After being a steady member of the California Council on Teacher Education (CCTE) for 14 years as a faculty member, program director, department chair, associate dean, and even as a mother, Cynthia Grutzik was nominated to run for President-Elect of CCTE in 2010. She was in a unique situation as she came into the CCTE presidency: two women had…

Both speaking and listening are essential to effective communication. Unfortunately, meaningful two-way exchanges are largely absent from conversations about improving professional practice. Instead, many teachers say that they feel the observation and evaluation process is something that is done "to" them--at the post-observation…

edTPA, a capstone assessment designed to assess whether new teachers are ready for the job by evaluating their teaching and their analysis of their teaching, helped prepare the author for the classroom in three ways. First, he became accountable to his students. Second, he learned to analyze his teaching. Third, he discovered how to relate…

The Reform Support Network has published "Support for Growth: How States Can Improve the Quality of Post-Observation Feedback" based on recommendations generated during a July 2014 Reform Support Network convening of leaders from nine States. It offers six strategies to accurately assess the performance of teachers and provide them with…

What is--or should be--the purpose of a teacher evaluation system? To compare teachers? To inform the public? To help teachers improve? Legislators might say that a teacher evaluation system's purpose is to remove bad teachers. Administrators might say that it is to assist them in matching teacher skills to specific groups of students. Parents…

Teachers and education leaders are aware that their words can have a significant effect on their students. Words can build them up and encourage them to work hard or tear them down and lead them to despair. The language used in teacher evaluations is no different, says teacher Brooke Eisenbach. In this article, she shares stories of colleagues…

Motivated by the need to improve teaching and learning and by federal priorities reflected in requirements for grant programs such as Race to the Top and the Teacher Incentive Fund, many states are developing teacher evaluation systems that include measures of individual teachers' contributions to their students' learning growth. One way to…

Teacher preparation programs have both a desire and a responsibility to demonstrate, with affirmative evidence, that teacher education makes a difference in PreK-12 student learning. Program faculty need good data to make decisions about the progress of students, whom to recommend for state licensure, and how to improve teacher education. This…

A proposal is presented to assess teacher's performance based on the aspects that educational research has found as fundamental to achieve students' learning. The proposal is aimed mainly at teachers and people responsible for teacher's assessment programs. After criticizing the traditional way of assessing teacher's performance, it is shown a…

Academic Audit is an important tool to control and maintain standards in academic sector. It has been found highly relevant by the experts across the world. Academic audit helps institutions to introspect and improve their quality. The present paper intends to probe into the possible role of Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC) in Academic Audit…

During the 2011-2012 school year, Tennessee became one of the first States to implement a comprehensive new teacher evaluation system based on multiple measures of teacher performance. In the Volunteer State, these multiple measures include student achievement data, value-added measures and multiple classroom observations. This paper and the…

Current methods of evaluating teaching in colleges and universities fail to encourage, guide, or document teaching that leads to improved student learning outcomes. Here the author presents a measure of teaching quality that is correlated with desired student outcomes, free from large confounding variables, and that can be used to compare the…

The prospects for a high-quality public education system for all students hinge on expanded roles for teachers. In particular, districts and states must create hybrid positions for teacherpreneurs: classroom experts who teach students regularly but also have time, space, and reward to spread their ideas and practices to colleagues as well as…

We all have emotional responses that affect what we do; teachers see all kinds of emotions emerge from students. Despite this fact some teachers think their purpose is to teach content and skills only, not to deal with the touchy-feely stuff. Rick Wormeli encourages teachers to develop constructive responses to their own affective needs and equip…

Training school leaders in the key areas of policy and state laws, basic statistical literacy, assessment types and purposes, and value-added models is particularly important because ideas shaping teacher performance evaluation are being considered at the national, state, and local levels. The authors argue that providing school leaders with this…