Monday, April 8, 2013

New Challenges and Solutions Related to Evaluating Educator Effectiveness

Evaluating educator effectiveness has become a major concern across the nation. The fundamental premise underlying this concern is that good teaching and effective educational management carried out in a supportive learning environment ought to produce enhanced learning. The linking of educator evaluation to student learning has changed the nature of educator evaluation in significant ways. The stakes associated with the evaluation process have been raised. Educator evaluation has become more formalized, subjected to greater scrutiny, and extensively controlled by state law. The inclusion of student data has increased the complexity of the evaluation process. Whereas in the past educator evaluation was limited in the main to informal observations, now in many states results of student assessments involving dozens of subjects are becoming or are being considered for inclusion as a required component of the evaluation process. Additional complexity stems from the need to consider multiple data sources for multiple classes of educators in the evaluation initiative. Finally, in order to realize the goal of improving learning through effective instruction, there is a need for dynamic evaluation systems that continually examine the relationships among ratings of educator effectiveness, professional development offerings based on those ratings and measures of student progress. For the past few years, ATI has been working closely with local education agencies to meet the challenges of evaluating educator effectiveness. As a result of this work, ATI has developed a comprehensive Instructional Effectiveness Assessment System.

The system is designed to address several key questions requiring action on the part of local education agencies in order to implement an effective, locally designed educator effectiveness system. These include:
  • How do we effectively link educator performance to student learning outcomes? 
  • How do we weight and compile multiple data sources for different educators to produce an overall proficiency score? 
  • How do we ensure that student performance data is reliable, valid, and useful for measuring growth? 
  • How do we ensure that teacher performance data is reliable, valid, and useful for guiding professional development and practice? 
  • How do we obtain actionable data throughout the year to inform decision-making?
To address these key questions, the Galileo comprehensive Instructional Effectiveness Assessment System has evolved in ways that now provide local education agencies with:
  • Reliable and valid educator rating scales aligned to the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) Model Core Teaching Standards, the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Educational Leadership Policy Standards, and Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
  • Reliable and valid measures of student progress in state-tested subjects;
  • Reliable and valid measures of student progress non-state-tested subjects;
  • An Evaluation Score Compiler that weights and automatically combines educator effectiveness indicators into a single score. 
Moreover, Galileo uses Item Response Theory (IRT) techniques to validate teacher performance scales and student assessment scales to produce a Proficiency Scale Score and Achievement/Growth Scores, respectively. IRT provides a continuous interval scale score to measure changes in proficiency and student growth over time. And IRT produces indicators of measurement precision including item difficulty, item discrimination and reliability.

If you would like to learn more about the ways in which we are supporting locally designed educator effectiveness initiatives contact us via email or at 877.442.5453 for more information. Also, watch for summer training opportunities that focus on educator effectiveness. Click here to access all current events, seminars, and webinars.

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