Gates Foundation: Preliminary Study on Measures of Effective Teaching
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project
which is designed to find out the best way to give teachers the information
and support they want. The project has brought together 3,000 teacher
volunteers in six different school districts with dozens of education experts and researchers.
MET's goal is to find out how evaluation methods can best be used to
tell teachers more about the skills that make them most effective and to
help districts identify great teaching.
In their second set of preliminary findings, the report finds that:
• High quality classroom observations require clear, specific
standards, well trained and certified evaluators and multiple
observations per teacher.
• Classroom evaluation is not enough. That information should be
combined with student feedback and data on improvement in student test
scores. Combining the three kinds of evaluations offsets the weaknesses
of each approach.
• The different evaluation methods still need to be refined, but they're better than what most districts are using now.
To learn more about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, click here.
