Teachers want to succeed, but they typically lack the conditions for success. Teachers generally work in isolation. They're on their own to adjust practice to better serve students. What guidance they get often is plagued by vague teaching standards, overly numerous and often trivial learning objectives, and testing systems that measure only some…

The Illinois New Millennium Initiative (NMI) is a statewide team of accomplished, early-career teachers and educators focused on classroom- and community-based solutions to improve public schools. In virtual and face-to-face collaborations, the NMI works to connect research findings with its own teaching experiences in order to design policies and…

This publication highlights a series of video clips featuring an overview and discussion of the Engaging Educators guide among State and local educational agency leaders from Race to the Top grantee States. [For "Engaging Educators: A Reform Support Network Guide for States and Districts," see ED611481.]

Researchers at NIET and elsewhere have studied the effectiveness of "TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement" (TAP) in raising student achievement, improving the quality of instruction, and increasing the ability of high-need schools to recruit, retain and support effective teachers. This document provides summaries of some…

In recent years, an increasing number of research projects have been dedicated to competency assessment not only in school and vocational education, but also in higher education (Blömeke, Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, Kuhn, & Fege, 2013). Compared to competency assessment in schools, competency assessment in higher education still is…

This article is about developing school-based self-assessing recursive pedagogies and case/action research practices and/or approaches in schools, and teachers, teacher researchers and researchers simultaneously producing and theorising their own practices using second-order cybernetics as a thinking tool. It is a move towards pragmatic…

Student evaluations can be seen as an opportunity for students to vent their views on the quality of teaching that they receive, and sometimes instructors trivialise the importance of this opportunity for dialogue with students and colleagues and reflection on teaching practice. This paper takes student evaluations of teaching quality seriously…

This article reports on an interview with Marcia McCaffrey, the state arts consultant for the New Hampshire Department of Education and current president of the State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education (SEADAE). The discussion revolved around how the new arts standards may interact with evolving structures of arts teacher evaluation…

The rapid pace of change on teacher evaluation continues across the states in 2012. Since 2009, 36 states and the District of Columbia Public Schools have made policy changes on their books related to teacher evaluation. In the few short months since the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) published "State of the States" and the…

While the candidate teacher - or EFL student teacher - explains something (a linguistic concept, aspect, skill, etc.), his/her peers/colleagues should be writing notes to evaluate his/her performance. The checklist below is a means or tool that they can use to do this job appropriately and efficiently. The checklist is organised in a way that…

Evaluation time can be like putting together a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle that is all sky--what, exactly, is the point? When all is said and done, one ends up with a big blue blob--nothing to show for all the effort. However, it doesn't have to be that way. Performance reviews can and should be an effective means of communication for both parties…

The assistant professor was shocked. For six years on the tenure track, all the assessments of his work had been positive--or at least not negative. His annual evaluations rated him consistently good or better on teaching, service, and research. The sparse written comments from his chair were in the vein of "you are doing what you need to do." The…

The accountability movement and high-stakes testing fail to attend to ongoing instructional improvements based on the regular assessment of student skills and teacher practices. Summative achievement data used for high-stakes accountability decisions are collected too late in the school year to inform instruction. This is especially problematic…

The Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) was first authorized in 2006 to support efforts to develop and implement performance-based compensation systems for teachers and principals in high-need schools. The authorizing statue specifies that grantees' performance pay systems are to provide incentives based on gains in student academic achievement,…

Increasingly, school districts, states, and teachers' unions are advancing evaluation reform through legislation and by negotiating changes to collective bargaining agreements. This has compelled education leaders and policy makers to grapple with difficult issues that have received lip service in the past: How can they help all teachers reach…