Creating meaningful alternatives to teacher evaluation

Guest Contributor: David Brazer

Veteran teachers and their school site administrators share a common challenge: how to make teacher evaluation more meaningful, less tense, and less time-consuming for teachers and the administrators who support them.

For as long as anyone can remember, teacher evaluations have been an unpleasant bureaucratic obligation for school administrators and little more than a nuisance for experienced, successful teachers. In most cases, evaluations provide little, if any, positive value to the educators involved. In the worst case, they can be adversarial and contentious, eroding professional relationships.

Veteran teachers appreciate classroom observations and helpful feedback on their practice. But a busy administrator is typically able to reach teachers only once every other year with, at most, two classroom observations. Additionally, administrators are overloaded with dozens of evaluations that must be completed every year, causing them to minimize the time they spend with teachers whose classrooms are working well. The bureaucratic process of teacher evaluation that exists today doesn’t provide meaningful, enriching feedback to successful teachers who want to improve their practice, and it doesn’t support administrators who want to expand their content and pedagogical expertise by learning from great teachers.

As a former principal and education researcher at George Mason University and Stanford, I see tremendous untapped potential in alternatives to the typical clunky evaluation process that can inspire more meaningful teacher reflection and growth while reducing bureaucratic work.

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Here’s a novel idea: Let’s treat successful, experienced teachers as developing experts who can teach school leaders about curriculum and pedagogy while honing their craft with feedback and professional conversation. To make this shift requires principals to rethink observations and conferences as mutual learning opportunities.

Decades of research on teacher development have shown how administrators can collaborate with teachers to turn a difficult situation into a growth opportunity for all involved (Glickman, Gordon, & Ross-Gordon, 2017): The learning experience for the teacher must be inquiry-based; a checklist is not going to inspire teacher growth. An effective process is less focused on a final assessment — “unsatisfactory,” “developing,” “satisfactory” — and instead accelerates the teacher’s growth path toward becoming an expert educator (Aurora Public Schools, 2007; Berkeley Federation of Teachers, 2017; Brazer, Bauer, & Johnson, 2019; Hattie, 2003; Robinson, 2011).

In districts like Anaheim Union High School District in California and Township High School District 214 in Illinois, inquiry-driven alternatives to evaluation are already in place. The model is simple: an experienced teacher with a proven track record of excellence creates a project intended to inform instruction.

Providing inquiry-based approaches to teacher evaluation encourages administrator-teacher pairs to investigate a “problem of practice,” create plans to address the problem of practice, collect evidence of progress, and reflect on learning and growth. Teachers are treated as professionals with true agency. This increases motivation. Administrators not only save time in the evaluation process, they become true thought partners in reflective teacher practice, often providing resources and support on a teacher’s learning journey.

How to address two key challenges: time and focus

One reason inquiry-based projects as alternatives to evaluations have yet to become the norm in K-12 education is the perception that these projects are more time-intensive than a traditional evaluation.

In order to make alternatives to evaluation time efficient for teachers, the district should invest in a tool like TeachFX that collects and surfaces relevant data for teachers and energizes reflection. (Both districts above use TeachFX for this purpose.)

Technology like this can automatically provides teachers with feedback on talk ratio, lesson design, the effects of questioning techniques, and other instructional practices intended to create more equitable classrooms, generate more student-to-student discussion, and extend learning. Because tools like TeachFX makes the time burden minimal for the teacher, an alternative to evaluation project might involve recording and reflecting on 5-10 classes, giving experienced teachers rich data with which to coach themselves and discuss with colleagues and instructional leaders.

Another central challenge of alternative projects is finding a meaningful focus. Again, a simple investment in technology can be worthwhile. TeachFX, for example, frames teachers’ data based on student engagement and student discourse — what research shows is highest leverage to improve instruction— and highlight the moments in their teaching from which they can learn the most. Teachers adopt a more professional stance when they control their own data and get to determine how best to use it to improve their practice. The alternative to evaluation project is thereby infused with meaning because it focuses on good teaching rather than bureaucratic compliance.

Meaningful, inquiry-based alternatives to teacher evaluation are an exciting way to help even the best teachers learn, improve their practice, and engage students more deeply.