Made to Measure: Teacher Assessment and Evaluation in Jewish Schools

Jennifer Lewis

American education is awash in evaluation these days. The driving notion seems to be that if we specify the outcomes we are after and test for them, good instruction will follow. This is both good news, and bad news, for Jewish schools. The bad news first. Vast resources are being directed away from teachers and students, and towards the development of tests: tests for students, tests for teachers, tests of administrators. One only has to glance at the newspaper to see the lively conversation all this testing has generated among parents, teachers and kids. Last year Detroit teachers reported that they spent 49 days of school (out of 180 days in the school year) administering standardized tests. That shifts the aims of instruction and takes time away from it as well. One perspective on our national obsession with assessment and evaluation is that it has depleted the teaching profession and made few improvements in student learning.

The good news? The emphasis on testing has yielded some important resources for educators when used judiciously. For example, we now have very detailed specifications of high-quality teaching that can be used by Jewish schools. For example, Marzano’s Teacher Observer Protocol provides clear descriptions of proficient teacher actions across subject matter areas; the TRU Framework is an example of a robust tool for articulating the components of mathematics teaching. And Jewish schools generally have the great advantage of being able to use these resources, as they choose. Free from federal mandates, Jewish schools can take the best of what these systems offer and leave behind some of their damaging side effects. In this article, I discuss some of the resources that are currently available specifically for teacher evaluation, and consider how they might be useful in Jewish educational settings. From my research and my experience in schools, I offer five guidelines for making productive use of assessment and evaluation resources.

Pick the right tools

My graduate student research group is conducting a study wherein we watch a number of videotaped lessons repeatedly, each time using a different observational assessment tool to appraise the quality of instruction. What we have learned is that, although teachers’ global performance is mostly level across the instruments, each instrument emphasizes different aspects of instruction. This means that school leaders can choose instruments strategically depending on their school’s instructional needs. So, for example, if a school’s priority is to build a positive climate for children, the principal might pick Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching. It’s estimated that this instrument is used in 90% of US public schools. Teachers and administrators alike feel that it captures the work of teaching well, and emphasizes important features of high-quality teaching. For example, “proficient” teaching is described this way in the Domain of “Classroom Environment”:

Teacher-student interactions are friendly and demonstrate general caring and respect. Such interactions are appropriate to the ages, cultures, and developmental levels of the students. Interactions among students are generally polite and respectful, and students exhibit respect for the teacher. The teacher responds successfully to disrespectful behavior among students. The net result of the interactions is polite, respectful, and businesslike, though students may be somewhat cautious about taking intellectual risks.

Danielson is relatively quiet on teaching particular content, though. A school that is more concerned with mathematics content, or literacy content, or the teaching of Bible, would do well to choose an instrument that makes those content areas more visible. While the Tanakh Standards from The Jewish Day School Standards and Benchmarks Project are not written to address Tanakh teaching, they do provide a strong framing for curriculum. These kinds of specification help schools develop a shared vocabulary about the teaching of content and the implications for good teaching. The TRU (Teaching for Robust Understandings of Mathematics) Framework describes high-level mathematics content instruction this way:

Classroom activities support meaningful connections between procedures, concepts and contexts (where appropriate) and provide opportunities for building a coherent view of mathematics.

Choosing an instrument for teacher evaluation that is aligned with the precise areas identified for a school’s instructional improvement is the first important decision in using evaluation tools wisely.

Make it collaborative

Across the US, teacher evaluation instruments are used increasingly to make “high-stakes” decisions about hiring, firing and retention. That has some unintended consequences: if teachers are worried that their performance on these observational assessments can sink their career prospects, the potential for these tools to help teachers improve is diminished. My research, and my experience working with teachers, indicate that these evaluation tools can be used much more fruitfully if they are anchors for collaborative conversations around instruction, rather than a mallet or a set of directives from on high. When teacher assessments are used to reward and punish teachers, teacher buy-in is threatened. Discussions about the hard work of teaching can be silenced if teachers are reticent to share their challenges. But teacher evaluation does not have to be an exercise in compliance rather than learning. Instead, teacher observation instruments can be touchstones to structure ongoing work that teachers do in collaboration with their peers and administrators to get better at what they do.

A great model for this is approach is drawn from a principal I studied in a large research project on teacher evaluation. “Raymond” (not his real name) creates verbatim transcriptions of each lesson he observes, and he then provides those transcripts to the teacher the following day. During their post-lesson conference, Raymond and the teacher sit together with the transcript and look at the teacher evaluation rubric adopted by his school system. During this conference time, the teacher uses evidence from the transcript to appraise her own performance. Together, Raymond and the teacher choose a focus for the next observation, based on what they learn from this post-lesson conference. Raymond’s implementation of teacher evaluation gives the teacher ownership of the process, encourages the use of evidence instead of opinion and memory, and prompts collaborative conversations around facets of instruction. In this way, teacher evaluation becomes a structure for teacher learning instead of a method for making consequential decisions about employment.

Stick with it

Teacher evaluation rubrics are typically many pages long and cover a wide range of teaching domains. As an example, the 2013 version of The Framework for Teaching by Danielson is 111 pages long and contains 22 components of instruction in four domains! It does little to improve instruction when such tools are frequently swapped out under teachers’ feet. My advice: pick an evaluation instrument and stick with it for a number of years, building a shared understanding of its view of instruction. It takes time to grow into the language that an instrument uses to describe instruction, and that language can animate conversations about teaching for many years. The reform-du-jour atmosphere causes innovation fatigue among teachers; besides, any reform worth its salt should be comprehensive enough to require long-term investment. Stay with a few big ideas, and resist that temptation to jump to the newest shiny thing that comes along.

One bite at a time

Once a school picks an instrument, select a couple of instructional foci within it and work on them over time, as a whole school. “Lizette,” another principal we studied, decided along with her faculty that they would work on instructional questions for two years. Teachers began by studying the following passage from one observational instrument:

Good teachers use divergent as well as convergent questions, framed in such a way that they invite students to formulate hypotheses, make connections, or challenge previously held views. Students’ responses to questions are valued; effective teachers are especially adept at responding to and building on student responses and making use of their ideas. High-quality questions encourage students to make connections among concepts or events previously believed to be unrelated and to arrive at new understandings of complex material. Effective teachers also pose questions for which they do not know the answers. Even when a question has a limited number of correct responses, the question, being nonformulaic, is likely to promote student thinking. (From Danielson’s Framework for Teaching)

Lizette organized a series of monthly professional development sessions focused on studying instructional questions together, and her weekly faculty meetings touched on this topic as well. Teachers read about instructional questions, watched videos of lessons and analyzed the kinds of instructional questions posed, and they designed lessons together using their new knowledge about instructional questions. The teachers gathered evidence in their own classrooms from these lessons, and they pored over what they saw as a result of their new questioning techniques.

Lizette’s observations of individual teachers highlighted planning for and evaluating teachers’ use of instructional questions, and she was able to document teachers’ progress on this dimension over time. In two years, the school saw real growth in teachers’ skill in this area, and student achievement rose along with it. What was key here was that this topic was worthy of ongoing study over time, and that beginning teachers and more experienced teachers alike would stand to gain from their joint study of this topic. Lizette chose not to address every domain in the observational instrument, which meant that other dimensions of instruction got relatively little attention while teachers developed a strong repertoire of instructional moves in questioning. This is a long-term strategy and underscores the fact that serious teacher growth involves career-long, collaborative effort.

Collect the right data

Teachers these days are encouraged to make “data-driven decisions,” in part because schools have more data than ever at their disposal. But the use of new teacher evaluation instruments depends on choosing the right data for decision-making. Often these are the data most proximal to a lesson: students’ work, a record of what students said in discussion, photographs of the whiteboard at the end of the lesson, a videotaped excerpt from the lesson. In visiting schools in Japan, we saw educators from a range of occupational identities (principals, teachers, professors, coaches) gathering together around a stack of student work or a photograph of the chalkboard following a lesson in order to appraise the quality of that lesson and how to improve the next one.

What we noticed was the close linkage between an observed lesson and the data from it, data that are relevant to student learning in that particular lesson. Imagine the kinds of productive conversations that ensue around components of an observational instrument when data are there to illustrate student learning. This conveys a number of important ideas about teaching: that each lesson matters, that the basis for judging the success of a lesson is evidence of student learning, that a single lesson is the crucial unit for appraising instruction, and that lessons are important enough that educators from every level of the system gather to study them together.

Like all forms of assessment and evaluation, teacher evaluation stands to improve instruction, but it can also stand in the way of instructional improvement and the building of professional capital if we don’t mind the details. Because they can skirt the high-stakes uses of assessment and evaluation, Jewish schools can select the instruments and the modes of engagement that best match the needs of their students. We’ve assumed that good teaching is obvious, but in fact these instruments make visible the intricate work and prodigious skill that is required. Jewish schools stand to benefit from the careful articulation of teaching practice. Done well, teacher evaluation systems can be the cornerstone of elevating the profession of teaching. Because Jewish schools opt into these systems, they are uniquely positioned to craft programs of assessment and evaluation that are tailor-made for each school’s needs.

Dr. Jennifer Lewis is an assistant professor of mathematics education at Wayne State University and works with the Mandel Foundation for Jewish Education. [email protected]

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HaYidion Taking Measure Fall 2015
Taking Measure
Fall 2015