According to Schacter, (2008) the Kalamazoo Teacher Accountability concept elicited hostility from 93 per cent of the educator participants involved in the study because research established a defensiveness among educators, largely due to the existing system of performance measurement for students.
The developmental path of research to date has then evolved to inform about personal attributes, knowledge, skills, characteristics, teaching methods and behaviors distinguish high caliber educators from mediocre ones.
Teachers of the highest caliber exist, and can be developed with a focus on efforts to develop and acquire actual teaching performance. A knowledge base must be established and continuously updated to aid in the development in the quality of the educator. Effective teaching exists, but it appears that there is a need for definition, and measurement related to student achievement.
Initially, the issue of pretests and posttests made sense to the teachers as means for deriving instructional decisions. Teachers typically use a pretest to ascertain the current knowledge base of the children. Unfortunately, teachers have not been given the adequate skill base to assist them in deciding what to teach, and at what depth. As was the case with the Kalamazoo study, teachers may have a notion of being evaluated, but they do not understand the totality of their accountability, which extends past their personal immediacy to generations of students and future educators. Hence, the efficacy
of the pretest needs to be more scrutinized. Students must understand the purpose of the pretest that scores do not count toward a grade, and that know that the result of the test is not to achieve high performance in a competitive realm...
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...5). "Internal accountability" in education. Retrieved 9-11-2011 from
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Milken Family Foundation (2000) Teacher Advancement Program Toolkit, version 3.
Milken, L. (1999). A Matter of Quality: A Strategy for Assuring the High Caliber of America’s Teachers. Presented at the 1999 National Education Conference President’s Presentation. Santa Monica, CA: Milken Family Foundation.
Milken, L. (2000). Teaching as the Opportunity: The Teacher Advancement Program. Presented at the 2000 National Education Conference President’s Presentation. Retrieved from the Internet 9-11-2011 Santa Monica, CA: Milken Family Foundation.
Obara, S. (2008) School accountability: mathematics teachers struggling with change. Journal of Case Studies in Education. Retrieved from the Internet 9-11-2011 http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/10685.pdf
In 2010, Charlotte Danielson wrote an article, “Evaluations That Help Teachers”, for the magazine The Effective Educator. The purpose of this article was to explain how a teacher evaluation system, such as her own Framework for Teaching, should and can actually foster teacher learning rather than just measure teacher competence, which is what most other teacher evaluation systems do. This topic is especially critical to decision-making school leaders. Many of the popular teacher evaluation systems fail to help schools link teacher performance with meaningful opportunities for the teachers to reflect on and learn from in order to grow professionally. With the increased attention on the need for more rigorous student standards, this then is an enormous opportunity missed. Students can only achieve such rigorous expectations if their teachers can effectively teach them, and research has shown that teachers who are evaluated by systems that hold them to accountability and provide them for continuous support and growth will actually teach more effectively.
The author states in “A New Deal for Teachers” that in America, especially in poorer school districts, teacher quality is lacking. In urban districts, out of the new teachers hired in the next three years, about half of them will quit (usually the quality ones). The recruitment of better teachers is, as the author says, the biggest problem in our education system. He states that he’s been told by urban teachers that many of their colleagues are incompetent. Contributing to this is that state requirements are very low, which allows poor quality teachers into schools. Miller explains that smart and competent people who want to be teachers, are getting more and more difficult to find. This is true mainly because there are fields of work that those
Charlotte Danielson, an internationally recognized expert in the area of teacher effectiveness, created The Framework for Teaching, which is comprised of four domains of teaching responsibility (Danielson, 1996). Danielson specializes in the design of teacher evaluation to ensure teacher quality and to promote professional learning. Danielson’s framework is based on large amounts of research, including the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, supported by the Gates Foundation (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2013). Danielson’s framework also aligns with the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC), which outlines what a beginner teacher should possess in skills. In addition, it is the underlying set of ideas
The overall purpose of schooling is to advance one’s knowledge and skill base and through standardized testing the belief is that one’s knowledge and skill base can be assessed and analyzed, but what occurs many a times is a teacher's difficulty to expand upon the learning process due to the confinements that testing has on his/hers ability to teach. In a qualitative study performed by the Morehead State University it was determined that in a particular rural school standardized testing had implemented a limit on the amount of time that teachers were able to instruct, as well as limitations on the “instructional resources and the types of assessments teachers employed” (Thomas, 2005). Even if a teacher was content with teaching the state
Nelson, S. W., McGhee, M. W., Meno, L. R., & Slater, C. L. (2007). Fulfilling the promise of educational accountability. Phi Delta Kappan, 88(9), 702-709. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/218481883?accountid=32521
166-173). Linda Darling-Hammond (2000) discusses how teacher education has changed and how it has affected our education system (p. 166). The author also notes how even the most intelligent people found it hard to prosper in the field without the right skills and preparation (Darling-Hammond, 2000, p. 166-173). In the article, she presents how post baccalaureate programs are carefully structured, versus alternative routes which can be no more than backup employment options. Darling-Hammond (2000) also addresses how it becomes difficult for aspiring teachers to learn both subject matter and pedagogy (p.
Politicians claim that Accountability is needed. Dylan Wiliam wrote that “The logic of accountability is deceptively simple”(110) He goes on to say that “students attending higher quality schools will (by definition) have higher achievement than those attending lower quality schools, so that the differences in quality of schools will result in systematic differences in achievement between schools”(110). Yes indeed accountability is needed. It is needed for those who pay for education (tax payers) and the people who are educated (the students). The institutions that regulate education should be held accountable for the policies they enact as well as the government that approved those actions. “Of the total variance in mathematics achievement of 15-year-olds in the United States in 2004 only 8% was attributable to the actual quality of the education provided by the school, the results in science are similar” (111). This is an indictment of the American school system, it points out that standardized testing is in fact inaccurate and unnecessary.
The National Education Association (NEA) conducted a survey, wherein teachers were asked various questions about the impact standardized testing has had in their classrooms. According to Tim Walker, “Forty-two percent of the surveyed teachers reported that the emphasis on improving standardized test scores had a ‘negative impact’ on their classroom, while only 15 percent said the impact was ‘positive,’” (para.5). According to this survey, fifty-two percent of teachers said that too much time on test prep, with it being estimated that the average teacher spends about thirty percent of class time focused on preparing for the test (Walker para.7). Despite the majority of teachers, the people who see the effects the most, reporting that standardized testing does significant harm to education, the results of the exams are still stressed far too much. It would appear that the stress on standardized testing has taken its toll on the educators, too, as forty-five percent of surveyed teachers reported that they had considered quitting due to the rising importance of standardized testing and their results (Walker para.
An outstanding educator possesses unique qualities that set him or her apart from others in the field. Ask any student about a favorite teacher and listen intently as he or she describes that person with a smile. Ask a parent of a child who will enter first grade in the fall about the teacher choice for their child. The parent would describe the outstanding educator in their desire for that special teacher. The qualities of an outstanding educator are easily recognized by those whose lives they touch, shape, and change on a daily basis. It is in this writing piece that they will be described and discussed.
...verage. When having test scores as an indication of a school’s competency, everything will be out of place, time oriented into a time slot we do not have the right amount of time for, and students will be peer pressured and possibly embarrassed.
Andes, Scott. “Getting Serious About Education: Why Can We Measure Students But Not Teachers?" Progressive Fix Website. 28 July 2010. .16 November 2010
The teacher was rated using a rubric with specific criteria in four domains including planning and preparation, the classroom environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities (Hillsborough County Public Schools, 2012). Within each of these domains are components which are the performance factors that are relevant to classroom teachers. In domain one the components include: demonstrating knowledge of content and pedagogy, demonstrating knowledge of students, setting instructional outcomes, demonstrating knowledge of resources and technology, designing coherent instruction, and designing student assessments. The components for domain two include: creating an environment of respect and rapport, establishing a culture for learning, managing classroom procedures, managing student behavior, organizing physical space. In domain three the components included are: communicating with students, using questioning and discussion, engaging students in learning, using assessment in instruction, and demonstrating flexibility and responsiveness. There is only one component that was rated for domain four which is reflecting on teaching.
The state’s new evaluation system was in response to administrators who produced, “superficial and capricious teacher evaluation systems that often don't even directly address the quality of instruction, much less measure students' learning” (Toch, 2008). Too often, the “good-ol-boy” attitude would insure mediocre educators would remain employed. Realizing this was often more the rule then the exception, the governor created educational mandates to focus, “on supporting and training effective teachers to drive student achievement” (Marzano Center, 2013). Initially, they expected the school districts and the teachers would have issues and experience growing pains, but in the end the goal was, “to improve teacher performance, year by year, with a corresponding rise in student achievement” (Marzano Center, 2013).
Everyone knows that when it comes to making a difference in a child’s academic and life achievements, their teachers play a large role. A teacher’s ability to relate to their students, and teach them to achieve both socially and academically contributes to how effective they are. What does it mean to be an effective teacher? Overall there seems to be an emphasis on teacher effectiveness related to how well their students are performing on standardized testing. As teachers we know there is more to being an effective teacher then just teaching our students based on tests. This paper will identify different definitions of an effective teacher along with how to assess teachers on being effective.
In spite of the importance of assessment in education, few teachers receive proper training on how to design or analyze assessments. Due to this, when teachers are not provided with suitable assessments from their textbooks or instructional resources, teachers construct their own in an unsystematic manner. They create questions and essay prompts comparable to the ones that their teachers used, and they treat them as evaluations to administer when instructional activities are completed predominantly for allocating students' grades. In order to use assessments to improve instruction and student learning, teachers need to change their approach to assessments by making sure that they create sound assessments. To ensure that their assessments are sound they need include five basic indicators that can be used as steps to follow when creating assessments. The first of these indicators and the first step a teacher must take when creating a sound assessme...