Teach Effectively!

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced funding of new educational initiatives 19 November 2009. The initiatives focus on creating intensive partnerships with school systems and developing means for measuring effectiveness in teaching.

In “An Effective Teacher in Every Classroom,” Vicki Phillips (Director of the education initiative in the foundation) wrote, “Nothing is as important to a student’s success in school as an effective teacher. You know it, and we know it. That’s why I am so excited about today’s commitment of $335 million to support our vision of putting an effective teacher in every classroom in America.” In announcements of its funding for education, the foundation identified several educational agencies and groups with which it will partner in hopes of improving outcomes.

I call readers’ attention to the second initiative, the one funding a project called “Measures of Effective Teaching.” I am pleased to learn that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is working toward measuring effective teaching. The Gates Foundation has repeatedly invested in initiatives to improve education, and it has candidly evaluated those efforts and reported their results to the public. Based on the foundation’s experience with previous projects, it has reshaped and redirected its efforts. I see this as movement in a valuable direction.

An important step toward supporting teachers and ensuring that all students have access to high quality instruction is to develop fairer and more useful measures of teacher effectiveness. This is the goal of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, which will support independent education researchers–in partnership with school districts, principals, teachers, and unions–to develop objective and reliable measures of effective teaching. Rather than relying solely on how well a teacher’s students do on assessments, the MET project seeks to uncover and develop a set of measures that work together to form a more complete indicator of a teacher’s impact on student achievement.

Researchers will collect data about factors that might reflect effective teaching. These areas include the following (drawn directly from the site):

• Student feedback through surveys
• Student work
• Supplemental student assessments
• Videotaped classroom lessons
• Teacher reflections on their videotaped lessons
• Assessment of teachers’ ability to recognize and diagnose student problems
• Teacher surveys on working conditions

I applaud the effort to include a broad range of measures in the research. This list taps some potentially valuable sources (e.g., recognition and response to student problems), but it lacks clear measures of the critical result: Student learning. Although I think basing measures of effectiveness solely on students’ outcomes is insufficient, I hope that the researchers will ultimately include data from objective assessments of students’ learning. I hope students’ outcomes are still in the mix.

Read the press release announcing about the Gates Foundation committing $335 million to promote effective teaching and raise student achievement. Also visit the foundation’s portal for its education efforts and read Vicki Phillips’ comments.