It is common knowledge that teacher quality is a key in-school factor affecting student achievement. While the quality of teaching clearly matters for how much students learn, this quality is challenging to measure. Evaluating teacher quality based on the level of their students' end-of-year test scores has been one method of assessing…

Over the past decade, states and districts have updated teacher evaluation systems in response to federal incentives, such as waivers to No Child Left Behind and grants from Race to the Top. The use of multiple measures, however, raises an important issue for policymakers and practitioners: to what extent should different measures of a teacher's…

Bringing philosophical work on friendship to bear on the growing body of critique about the state of the neoliberal academy, this paper defends academic friendship. Initially a vignette illustrates the key features of academic friendship and the multiple demands on academics to account for themselves in the neoliberal university. We locate…

Many schools and districts have considerable discretion when hiring teachers, yet little is known about how that discretion should be used. Using data from a new teacher screening system in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), we find that performance during screening, and especially performance on specific screening assessments, is…

In most U.S. schools, teachers are evaluated using observation of teaching practice (OTP). This study investigates rater effects on OTP ratings among 421 principals in an authentic teacher evaluation system. Many-facet Rasch analysis (MFR) using a block of shared ratings revealed that principals generally (a) differentiated between more and less…

The vast majority of studies concerning the implementation of quality assurance in higher education institutions have been conducted from a national perspective, with few cross-national studies. This study aimed to explore the implementation of quality assurance standards in Europe from a comparative perspective. A questionnaire based on…

Major teacher evaluation changes have occurred across the nation during the past decade. Pressed by federal education initiatives and encouraged by research on promising teacher evaluation practices, states and school districts have implemented evaluation systems using new measures of educator practice and student learning. A growing body of…

As technology changes in our everyday lives, so does education to parallel those changes in technology. Nationally, distance education is rapidly changing, and community colleges are chasing after students digitally to add them to their enrollment numbers. Federal regulations require distance education courses to include regular and substantive…

Schools and Initial Teacher Training/Education providers have joint responsibility for developing trainee subject knowledge. Due to the current curriculum and training emphasis placed upon the importance of subject knowledge, the relationship between it and overall teaching grades is of interest when monitoring trainee assessment data collated…

While many states have adopted new requirements for teacher evaluations in pursuit of Race to the Top funding (Darling-Hammond, 2013), this qualitative case study of one Rocky Mountain school district that has been working on developing a system of supervision and evaluation to support teacher effectiveness for over a decade examines how teachers…

The question of how academics in higher education institutions demonstrate they have the ability to teach and provide a high quality learning experience challenges the sector. Within this context, the use of professional dialogue for recognising teaching expertise is growing. This qualitative research explored how 16 academics valued their…

The current focus on identifying criteria for academic teaching practice is influencing performance goals for teaching academics. This has produced a strong imperative to engage with the scholarship of teaching and learning; however, it is not always clear how teaching academics continue to build capacity to do this during their academic career.…

Different conceptualizations exist about the components of the knowledge teachers need to teach mathematics with professional consciousness, and a researcher needs to describe and assess that knowledge. The fact, however, is that different conceptualizations respond to different needs, and thus, the variety is even a chance to develop the field…

This article describes a project initiated to address the challenges of providing high-quality professional development to teachers in rural schools. Spread over the vast northwest corner of Colorado, where it takes over two hours to drive from one end of the region to the other, the Northwest Colorado Board of Cooperative Educational Services (NW…

As public education secretary of New Mexico, Hanna Skandera dug in fast, set an ambitious agenda, and broke a lot of china. Her ability to inspire and subsequently ignore controversy is clear: from the outset, she was deemed so contentious that the state senate refused to confirm her for four years, during which she performed her duties as…