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...