SEATTLE (AP) — Once-a-year evaluations aren’t enough to help teachers improve. That’s according to a new report from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The foundation’s multi-year national study involving thousands of teachers has found that school districts using infrequent classroom observations to decide who are their best — and their worst — teachers could be making some big mistakes.
Preliminary results were posted online Friday.
The researchers say good teacher evaluations require multiple nuanced observations by trained evaluators. Those results should be combined with other measures, such as student test scores and classroom surveys, to gather enough information to both evaluate teachers and help them improve.
____
Online:
Measures of Effective Teaching Project: http://www.metproject.org
