HR Educator Evaluation Cheat Sheet: 8 Best Practices From Recent Research

• Great teaching CAN be measured. • Teachers need meaningful feedback to grow. • Observations should be done by multiple reviewers, multiple times. Specifically, the report notes that shorter, more frequent observations from two or more observers per teacher provide a more reliable snap-shot of true teacher performance, rather than one individual performing a single, longer observation. • Building processes that increase trust and fairness will result in better data. • Surveying students? Ensure confidentiality. The report notes that student survey data becomes more reliable when students feel that they are able to provide anonymous feedback. • Utilize multiple measures when building teacher evaluation or performance index formulas. The report states, "Compared with schemes that heavily weight one measure, those that assign 33 percent to 50 percent of the weight to student achievement gains achieve more consistency, avoid the risk of encouraging too narrow a focus on any one aspect of teaching, and can support a broader range of learning objectives than measured by a single test."

1. Communication is essential. Ensure you have a process that is documented, communicated, and available online for everyone to see. Even if the state department of education or state legislature has made the policy, make sure you understand it, know where to go with questions, and are communicating the status of the work with staff regularly. Communication with parents and stakeholders is also important. 2. Select great measures. Unless your data is coming from a state contract, work carefully to select a vendor who supplies the information, level of customer service, and transparency you need. Commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Battelle for Kids developed a free website, www.edgrowthmeasures.org, with information to consider when selecting a growth measures provider. 3. Train, check, train, recheck, and train again. Those responsible for performing classroom observations must be trained and evaluated continuously, particularly when teachers' evaluation scores are being tied to high-stakes decisions around compensation, tenure, promotion, or dismissal. It is also important to keep the training process transparent. 4. Work constantly to build understanding. Ensure educators know how their performance is being measured and evaluated. Find someone who can not only help staff understand the data, but how best to use it to improve their practice. 5. Encourage questions and feedback. There are many places in the evaluation process where error or issue can occur. Giving those evaluated the ability to identify the issue and voice a resolution is important for fairness, validity, rigor, and legality. 6. Be strategic in weighting measures. The MET report found that evaluation systems which "assign 33 percent to 50 percent of the weight to student achievement gains achieve more consistency... and can support a broader range of learning objectives than measured by a single test." Multiple measures--weighted appropriately--are critical to developing an evaluation system that is reliable and helps educators improve their practice. It is also important to remember that it's not necessarily the more measures the better, but the more RIGHT measures the better. 7. Keep an eye on your data: If preliminary evaluation/observation data doesn't match the other performance data you are collecting, look for ways to ensure validity of evaluation scores. For example, the MET project found that evaluations of teachers done by multiple individuals and someone other than their principals may yield more accurate results. Don't get to the end of the school year and then realize that there are issues with the data that could have been addressed early on. 8. Practice comprehensive and strategic human capital management: Align your evaluation system to other human capital initiatives, such as hiring, professional development, and succession planning. It is essential to give teachers and principals the chance to reflect on their practice as well as time, resources, and opportunities to improve.