TEACHER PERCEPTIONS OF TEACHER EVALUATION USING THE TEACHER PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT SYSTEM AND FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO TEACHER QUALITY, PROFESSIONAL GROWTH, AND INSTRUCTIONAL IMPROVEMENT OVER TIME

The primary purpose of teacher evaluation is to improve teaching practice, which results in increased student achievement. In practice, however, evaluation systems have been generally used as sorting mechanisms for identifying the lowest performing teachers for selective termination. The school system in this study, like others, aspires to have all of its teachers consistently performing at a highly effective level. The problem of practice faced by the school system is the inability of a large number of teachers rated “effective” to summarily improve their practice over time and move to the “highly effective” rating. In essence, how does a teacher evaluation metric maximize the chances that those who remain in the profession become accomplished practitioners? This research triangulates teacher evaluation, self-reflection and their roles in improving teacher quality. The prevailing thought is that teachers who willingly engage in more formalized self-reflection and self-assessment yield higher degrees of teacher effectiveness as measured on a local teacher evaluation. The central focus of this study will investigate tenured teachers’ perceptions of the effect of their teacher evaluation tool on teacher quality and other factors that contribute to a teacher’s improvement of instructional performance over time. The researcher would also like to investigate the extent to which teacher cohorts – differentiated by demographic data - engage in formalized practices of self-reflection about their own teaching practice. Lastly, the researcher would like to determine whether or not tenured teachers who are evaluated with the local teacher evaluation tool actually improve their teacher effectiveness over time. This study was conducted in a public, K-12 school system with 1420 teachers employed - 39 of which are National Board Certified. This schools system is located in a rural/suburban school system and has utilized its current teacher evaluation system since 2000. The findings of this study indicated that the majority of teachers – disaggregated by demographic teacher cohort - viewed their local teacher evaluation system somewhere along the continuum of neutral to satisfactory as a tool for building a teacher’s effectiveness over time. The overwhelming majority of teachers embraced the post-conference as the most impactful part of the entire evaluation process in building teacher quality; the least impactful was the pre-conference. Additionally, teacher respondents – agnostic of demographic – opined that while the local teacher evaluation system was perceived to be a both quality control and a compliance factor for teachers, less than half of all respondents believe that the system, assists teachers formatively as a tool for professional development. Per the respondents, it should be noted that the teacher evaluation system elicited the strongest reactions – both positive and negative - in teachers having experienced more than 20 formal observations. The research also conveyed that most teachers reported that there was much more embedded self-reflection in the evaluation system than hypothesized; most prominently, teachers cited that audio-taping, reviewing student performance data, completing a self-reflective checklist, and engaging in unstructured self-reflection were a few of the assorted self-reflective activities were facilitated by the evaluation system. Moreover, the data clearly demonstrated that all teachers engage in high degrees of reflection regardless of demographic cohort and a majority of teachers claim to already know how to “self-reflect.” In other words, the highest self-reported degree of reflection were those teachers already rated as “highly effective” in the local evaluation system. A prevalent trend in the data was that degrees of self-reflection matter and build more pronounced levels of teacher effectiveness over time. In essence, the fact that teachers participate in reflection does not seem to impact teacher quality; rather, the degree and amount to which one reflects is actually what matters in building instructional capacity in teachers. Other noticeable trends in the data were as follows: more years of teaching experience was inversely related to the degree to which a teacher self-reflects; over 30% of teachers with more than 20 years of experience reported that that they do no self-reflect at all; the non-NBCT teacher cohort out reflects the NBCT cohort; NBCT teachers had the highest average evaluation rating out of every teacher cohort; and, teaching experience seems to mute any lack of reflection in a teacher’s evaluation rating; The other noticeable trend was that more formal observations for teachers did not translate into higher evaluation ratings over time. Overall, the two most impactful professional development activities cited by teachers were the following: participation in professional learning communities and peer coaching and mentoring, respectively

Педагогика и качество на образованието в НБУ

This report aims to examine the quality of education and pedagogical practices that apply in New Bulgarian University for training in graphic design and computer design in two dimensions in the Department of Design and Architecture. Will be exposed to teaching methods, assessment practices, facilities, various internships offered in the University and appropriate learning outcomes at the university. Interest is e-learning system "MOODLE", which has its advantages, but poses some disadvantages. Emphasis will be the system of internal evaluation of teachers by students, as well as internal resources for training and retraining of permanent, part-time and newly recruited teachers. I will also comment on possibilities for internal and external events that provide students with two-dimensional computer design and graphic design. Will be considered different forms of training at the New Bulgarian University - regular, part time, distance and continuing education and will discuss the pedagogical practices of teachers in the University. As a conclusion will be presented qualitative analysis of developments in teaching practices over the years

Assessment in Primary School Mathematics Classrooms in Nigeria

Mathematics is the foundation for the economic and technological development of any nation. It has been asserted that without mathematics there cannot be any modern developed Society (Ukeje, 2005). This accounts for the reason why Mathematics is made a compulsory subject at the Primary and Secondary School levels in Nigeria (Federal Republic of Nigeria, 2008). Thus, mathematics is expected to help in accelerating social, economic and technological progress of any Society. But these, in the final analyses, depend on the effective teaching and learning of mathematics in schools. The Primary school level is very important in any educational system because any default at this level would permeate to other levels of the educational system. To realize the objectives of teaching mathematics at any level of the educational system in the Society, there is need to monitor and maintain the quality of the educational processes and products. One major way of monitoring the quality and standards of the teaching and learning of mathematics in schools is through the assessment of the learning outcome of the pupils. The essence of using tests and other evaluation instruments during the instructional process is to guide, direct, and monitor students’ learning progress towards the attainment of the course objectives (Alonge, 2004; Kolawole, 2010). This monitoring of learning achievements in mathematics involves the processes of testing, measurement, assessment and evaluation. A test is set of questions, tasks or problems intended to measure an individual’s knowledge, skill, aptitude, intelligence etc. Testing is therefore a systematic procedure of presenting a set of questions, tasks, or problems to testes and expecting them to respond to the items either orally or written, and sometimes by performance within a specified time schedule. Measurement is the assignment of numbers or marks to observed event or response to testing. Assessment is the process of using the results from measurement to take decisions about the object of assessment. Evaluation is a systematic process of determining the extent to which the learners have achieved the stated instructional objectives. Assessment provides the logic and justification for the judgemental stance of evaluation (Anikweze, 2010). Assessment is an integral part of the teaching learning process and is expected to contribute to students’ learning. If assessment does not contribute to the teaching learning process, then it is not necessary to assess the students. Indeed , evaluation is an important aspect of good teaching and learning process because no matter how efficient the teacher, how intelligent the pupils, how adequate the audio-visual equipment, if no provision is made for some evaluation of progress, the teaching may be invalidated. Unfortunately some teachers see assessment as an isolated activity from the teaching and learning processes. Hence, some teachers haphazardly carry out the assessment processes of the pupils without utilising the goals and benefit of assessment in the classroom. Some of the teachers see assessment mainly for the purpose of grading the pupils. In the Nigerian educational system, Continuous Assessment was introduced in 1982 for the assessment of students at all the levels of the educational system. This replaced the one-shot, or end of course only summative evaluation practiced in the past. Under this system, teachers are to evaluate the learners using written tests, assignments, projects and other assessment instruments during the course and at the end of the term or session. The continuous assessment given during the course accounts for about 30-40 percent, while the end of term assessment accounts for 60-70 percent of a pupil’s scores. This gives teachers the opportunity to monitor and assess the learning progression of the pupils in his class. The continuous assessment is guidance oriented. This requires the skills of teachers in test construction and administration and record keeping. Teachers are expected construct valid and reliable tests which could be used in all schools following established procedures and practices of test construction. In addition to test construction (which is mainly on cognitive aspect of learning), teachers should also be able to measure the learners affective attributes such as attitudes, motives, interest, values and other personal characteristics. The teachers should also be able to provide clues or measures about the physical alertness and patterns of learners’ psychomotor attributes. The continuous assessment is said to be comprehensive as it is expected to measure the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains of learners. This involves a great variety of instruments such as: tests, interviews, questionnaire, assignments, and observations as shown below

A Study Showing Research Has Been Valued over Teaching in Higher Education

Research has been valued and given priority over teaching for a long time in academia.  In recent decades, the Taiwanese Ministry of Education has pursued objective and quantitative research criteria and has encouraged higher education institutions to ask teachers to publish papers in SSCI or SCI journals as part of the criteria for promotion and evaluation.  This policy strengthens the concept that research has priority over teaching because teachers must devote more time to research than to teaching in order to be promoted and evaluated. The purpose of this study is to explore the influences that cause teachers to value research over teaching.  To achieve this purpose, document analysis, the analysis of Taiwan Higher Education database and interviews were adapted as methods. First of all, our researchers collected and analyzed the documents for promotion and evaluation of twelve different universities whose areas of specialty included general studies, education, medicine, vocational studies, and the arts. Then, the study used and analyzed the empirical data of teachers’ working hours every week for different tasks from the Taiwan Higher Education Database which investigated the working conditions of teachers in higher education in 2004. Additionally, twenty professors who have different areas of study and work in different types of universities were interviewed to collect teachers’ opinions of the task priority of research, teaching, and service duties.  The results showed that academia in Taiwan exhibits the phenomenon that research is valued over teaching. The reasons are due to the requirements of the reward system. The reward system emphasizes research over teaching and service. Teachers’ research achievements are judged based on publishing articles in different types of journals and the amount of research funding they can obtain. The results also showed that every week teachers spend the most time on teaching, then on research, and finally on service. However, teachers emphasize research as the most important task, then teaching, and finally service. Although the majority of teachers think research is the most important duty, there is still twenty percent of teachers who think it is the least important. Although teaching has been thought of as the second most important duty after research, it is the task that the most teachers give as the first priority as far as time spent and none of the interviewees thought it is the least important. Universities and teachers all try to use their professionalism as capital to gain financial support from the government. This situation forces teachers to try to put more time and energy into research, but they still need to maintain teaching and service work quality. Some teachers focus more time and energy on research and ignore the needs of students. Working time endlessly increases even for teachers who out value on both teaching and research. Some suggestions based on the findings have been proposed for Taiwanese higher institutions

An Analysis of Principal Perceptions of the Primary Teaching Evaluation System Used in Eight U.S. States

This research examines how public school principals in eight U.S. states perceive their teacher evaluation systems which are based on Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching (FfT).  States were selected to represent high, middle, and low scorers in the annual Education Week “Quality Counts” report (Education Week, 2016).  1,142 out of over 8,100 working principals in the eight states responded to an online survey, yielding a response rate of over 14%.  Most principals were not satisfied with FfT and found implementing the system too cumbersome.  Responses suggested an average of two changes to FfT desired by each principal; few wanted to keep their FfT as is.  Targets for improvement included overhauling software used to enter teacher evaluations; eliminating student growth goals and student test scores (VAMs) as part of evaluations; reducing the time and paperwork required; and wanting more training for administrators and teachers on the use of FfT.  Some states’ principals wanted to return control over teacher evaluation systems to local school districts.  Most respondents agreed that their version of FfT has improved their school’s instructional program, and they prefer the new instrument over their previous evaluation instrument

Rush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation in Public Education

The troubled state of teacher evaluation is a glaring and largely neglected problem in public education. Co-director Thomas Toch and Robert Rothman of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform examine the causes and consequences of the crisis in teacher evaluation, as well as its implications for the current debate about performance pay

Creating a Successful Performance Compensation System for Educators

Offers recommendations for reforming teacher compensation systems and outlines important design elements of successful performance-pay plans

Review of State Policies on Teacher Induction

Outlines criteria and recommendations for state policies on providing mentoring support for new teachers and administrators, including universality, program standards on design and operation, mentor quality, program delivery, funding, and accountability