The Teaching Evaluation Gap

Why students' cultural identities hold the key

By Willis D. Hawley & Jacqueline Jordan Irvine

Teacher evaluation has, until recently, been a symbolic act largely without meaning or consequence. No longer. Race to the Top requirements call for performance-based pay. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's multi-million-dollar investment to define effective teaching will produce highly specified systems of teacher evaluation. Other reforms tie tenure and leadership roles to measures of teacher effectiveness.

Attention to serious teacher evaluation is long overdue. However, most of the protocols for measuring performance give inadequate attention to teaching practices that are particularly effective with students from diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. By ignoring these research-based practices, generally called "culturally responsive pedagogy," or CRP, any high-stakes teaching evaluation is likely—unintentionally and ironically—to fail the very students most in need of highly effective teaching.

Current discussions of teacher evaluation often focus on performance as reflected by student test scores or value-added measurement, or VAM. Taken in isolation, VAM, which typically accounts for less than 50 percent of the evaluation, will have little effect in improving teacher performance because it does not measure teaching practices.

In contrast, research shows that well-executed evaluation based on observations of teacher behavior can increase teacher effectiveness. Giving teachers the opportunity to learn how to improve specific practices magnifies the effect. If teaching practices—such as CRP—that have been shown to be important for students from diverse backgrounds are not included or adequately assessed, the achievement of these students will be limited accordingly.

Culturally responsive teachers understand that all students, regardless of race or ethnicity, bring their culturally influenced cognition, behavior, and dispositions to school. For example, ethnically diverse students' mastery of English, pronunciation, vocabulary, and phonology (rhythm, tempo, or pitch) often differ. What is spoken and left unspoken, whether one interrupts, defers to others, or asks direct or indirect questions, can vary importantly from group to group.

Culturally responsive teachers understand how semantics, accents, dialect, and discussion modes affect face-to-face interactions. Similarly, nonverbal communications can raise questions about the cultural meanings of interpersonal space, eye contact, body language, touching, and gestures. Culturally responsive teachers not only understand differences related to race, ethnicity, culture, and language, they treat them as assets upon which to build rather than as deficits to overcome.

Culturally responsive teachers know how to adapt and employ multiple representations of subject-matter knowledge using students' everyday lived experiences. This bridges the gap between students' personal cultural knowledge and the unknown materials and concepts to be mastered. Culturally responsive teachers learn from families and community organizations and use this knowledge to inform their teaching and help families support their children's education. Culturally responsive teachers, aware that students of color are not mere products of their culture, avoid making generalizations about group behavior or identity. Culturally responsive teachers interact with students as individuals, caring and supporting them while holding high expectations.

"Culturally responsive teachers understand that all students, regardless of race or ethnicity, bring their culturally influenced cognition, behavior, and dispositions to school."

Unfortunately, many educators discount the effects of race and ethnicity on student learning. They may find it difficult to understand and respond to cultural differences. Many believe that race is no longer relevant or that paying attention to race is a form of discrimination. Teachers may see poverty as the main challenge, and not focus on their own behaviors or inequitable school policies and practices. The socioeconomically related experiences of students are unquestionably important, but students' race and ethnicity, in addition to their culture and language, are powerful influences on students' learning, independent of their family wealth.

Many dozens of observation protocols exist for …

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Willis D. Hawley is a professor emeritus of education and public policy at the University of Maryland and the director of the Teaching Diverse Students Initiative of the Southern Poverty Law Center, in Montgomery, Ala. Jacqueline Jordan Irvine is the Charles Howard Candler professor emerita of urban education at Emory University, in Atlanta.