Popular Frameworks Found to Identify Effective Teachers

Teachers who embodied the teaching skills outlined in certain popular teaching frameworks tended to help their students learn more, concludes a new study released by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The report is the second major release from the foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project, which seeks to identify the best gauges of effective teaching. Ultimately, the Seattle-based foundation plans to devise a prototype teacher-effectiveness measure based on the findings.

Among other implications, the study’s results suggest that observations of teaching practice hold promise for being integrated into teacher-evaluation systems—if observers are carefully trained to ensure consistent application of the frameworks over multiple observations. Also, the study indicates that the gauges that appear to make the most finely grained distinctions of teacher performance are those that incorporate many different types of information, not those that are exclusively based on test scores.

“I was surprised at how aligned all the measures were,” said Douglas O. Staiger, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H., and one of the principal researchers on the study. “They seem to pick out teachers who are good on a range of dimensions, and I think that says there really is something kind of coherent about good teaching.”

Other studies have also linked teaching frameworks to student growth. But the breadth of measures studied, the number of districts and teachers included, and the focus on reliability in the Gates Foundation analysis give a richer picture of how stakeholders might create evaluation systems based on multiple measures, said Douglas N. Harris, an associate professor of education policy and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the study.

Still, he added, “all of this is being done in a low-stakes context. The question going forward is to what extent these conclusions apply in a high-stakes setting.”

The Gates Foundation also provides grant support for Education Week’s coverage of the education industry and for organizational capacity-building by the newspaper’s nonprofit publisher.

Findings Rundown

The study, “Gathering Feedback for Teaching,” released last week, draws on some 7,500 videotaped lessons taught by more than 1,300 grade 4-8 teachers across six school districts in several states. Each lesson was scored by multiple observers trained on one of several teaching frameworks.

The two general frameworks studied are consultant Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching and the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, a rubric designed by Robert C. Pianta, currently the dean of the education school at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. Three subject-specific frameworks, one in English/language arts and two in mathematics, were also tested.

The scores were then analyzed by looking at a variety of outcomes for students taught by those teachers. Among the new findings:

• All five frameworks were shown to bear a positive relationship to student achievement, as measured by growth on both state tests and more cognitively challenging exams, though the correlation was often “modest” in size.

• The error associated with the instruments was quite large when ...

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