Factors That Impact Teacher Effectiveness

Based on the Georgia Department of Education, Georgia has a new way of evaluating all of its teachers. Beginners teachers are held with the same standards as tenured teachers. The evaluation is through Teacher Keys Effectiveness System (TKES) which is consist of three components which gives to an overall Teacher Effectiveness Measure (TEM). First component is Teacher Assessment on Performance Standards (TAPS). The second component is Surveys of Instructional Practice (student perception surveys). Lastly Student Growth Percentile and Student Learning Objective. (SGP and SLO).

First of all, continual feedback allows teachers to self-reflect on best practices. For example, a teacher can target his/her areas of weakness in order to grow professionally and gain further insight of best practices. Another benefit, of teacher evaluations is higher student success rates. These, for example, are measurable through district assessments and state standardized assessments. If a teachers success rate has significantly improved through modification of practices, T-TESS has served its intended purpose. Finally, yet another benefit of teacher evaluations is the fact that the educator is an active participant in his/her evaluation process. For example, through goal setting, the educator is allowed the opportunity to decide where he/she want to grow. Through the evaluation cycle and the communication therein, the appraiser and educator both take greater responsibility in understanding and meeting established goals. Finally, at the end of the process, student growth is an indicator of a well-developed and integrated evaluation system. These are but a few of the many benefits reaped from an evaluation systems such as T-TESS (TEA,

As schools across the nation look for a uniform method to evaluate teachers’ performances, concerns about both methods are highlighted. NYC is using the Danielson Framework to evaluate teachers this year; some concerns have been brought up by administrators and the teachers union. In the piliot program it was noted by one administrator that “some of her teachers are not scoring as high on the rubric as she would expect — precisely because the rubric expects the same general characteristics in all grades” (Cromidas, 2012). This is because in the Danielson Framework the observer is looking for weather a teacher is doing the behavior or not. Check mark - there is no distinction between a new teacher and a veteran teacher. The other thing that administrators are noting that the “practicing observing teachers using Danielson had proved to be time-consuming” (Cromidas, 2012). It is recommend that they observer spends a number of informal observations lasting at least 15 minutes in the classroom before the official observation and that the report be turned around in 48 hours to the teacher.

The state of California should analyze the enormous complexity of this issue, including the impact of teacher quality on student achievement, the evidence that teachers regularly migrate out of low-performing schools, and the potential solution that lies in offering incentives to well-qualified teachers who commit to work in struggling schools (ca.gov).

Professor Friedman says, “If you leave a low value-added teacher in your school for 10 years, rather than replacing him with an average teacher, you are hypothetically talking about $2.5 million in lost income.” Schools need good teachers, but firing unqualified teachers has proved to be a difficult task.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2013). Getting teacher evaluation right: What really matters for effectiveness and improvement. Teachers College

We would all like to think that schools are going to educate every child and expect them to bring every child to high standards of performance. Until fairly recently it was a permissible practice to reserve the most qualified teachers for those schools serving high-achieving, affluent, college-bound students who were believed to hold the greatest promise of success. Holding school districts accountable for improving the performance of all schools and all students might well require that resources, both human and financial, be allocated according to greatest need (ca.gov). This notion presents a challenge to public

However, how we educate our teachers currently affects generations of people to come. Because of the influx of teachers, we need to metamorphose how we educate our educators. How are we doing in terms of educating our teachers now? Not as great as we could be doing. In a report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, going to a certain school for a teacher’s education could be a never-ending path of sorrow and pain.The failing college in undergraduate education for elementary teacher education was Jackson State University, a public university in Jackson, Mississippi. This university has a population of 9,802 and sits at #537 out of 660 universities on the Forbes Magazine America’s Top Colleges List. If a public university harbors such scores, it cannot be accepted as a viable path for teacher training. In a study done by Dan Goldhaber, Lesley Lavery, and Roddy Theobald (Goldhaber and Theobald of American Institutes for Research and Lavery of Macalester College) it was found that students in currently disadvantaged demographics in Washington State get the teachers with the least experience and of the lowest quality. The study judged disadvantagement in three ways: by race, by income, and by academic success. All the teachers that were put to these disadvantaged groups were deemed to be extremely novice and not effective at all. Experience is key, as a

After reading the report, one could characterize current teacher evaluation practices as little more than missed opportunities to increase the effectiveness of teachers and assure that the best teachers stayed in front of students. Practitioners generally agreed with the premise of the critique, and confirmed the identified evaluation weaknesses as both common and wide-spread among school districts. Using teacher effect research and the validity of value-added measures as a platform, and armed with the belief that the sample practices were representative of those in districts across the country, the authors of The Widget Effect urged educational leaders and policy makers to implement specific teacher evaluation reforms, many of which informed (or mirrored) those becoming increasingly prevalent in federal and state

There are many consequences to evaluating teachers by the rise and fall of students test score such as low morale, teachers willingness to work with low performing students and schools.

Longitudinal data collections serves three purposes to (1) monitor educational reform policies, (2) capture data on students from kindergarten through college, and (3) monitor teacher’s performance (State Longitudinal Data System, n.d. para. 3). If teachers base their instructional decision making on longitudinal data, then they should be literate in statistical data analysis because “growth models can be complex and difficult for non-statistician to understand” (“Teachers Ability….” 2011 pg. 24; “Measuring Student Growth:” n.d. pg. 8). For instance, some of the literacy skills needed to be effective include properly reading histograms, analyzing score distribution, the effect of outliers, limits on generalizability, understand measurement

One of the largest problems with education in the United States is teacher retention (McLaurin, Smith, & Smillie, 2009). Some remaining challenges in education is the loss of new teachers during their first years in the profession (Nelson, Duke, Hutchens, & Machell, 2014). Teacher preparation programs have been found to be significantly related to teacher quality (Katitia, 2015). Teacher quality is known as the primary force in student learning outcomes (Ring & West , 2015).

An effective teacher evaluation system should measure strengths and weaknesses through an accurate and consistent process that provides

A philosophy of mathematics should be included in an excellent philosophy of education. A philosophy of mathematics should include your thoughts and ideas about what mathematics education is, what impact it has on society, the qualities that make a good teacher, a teacher’s role, research on the standards and instructional strategies, and ways to ensure student are able to learn mathematic concepts in your classroom. Each of these ideas should forever be evolving because we grow as teachers our thought and ideas will grow. I will be discussing my thoughts and ideas on what creates an excellent philosophy of mathematics.

There are four broad categories of measurable and policy-relevant indicators to organize the teacher characteristics assumed to reflect teacher quality. The four categories include teachers’ years of experience, teachers’ highest level of education, the number of educators teaching outside of their certification area, and average teacher turn over. According to Jennifer King Rice, an Economic Policy Institute research associate at the University of Maryland, there has been a positive impact of experience on teacher effectiveness; specifically, the “learning by doing” effect is most obvious in the early years of teaching. Evidence suggests that teachers who have earned advanced degrees have a positive impact on high school mathematics and science achievement when the degrees earned were in these subjects. Rice also stated a positive effect of certified teachers on high school mathematics achievement when the certification is in mathematics. Studies show little impact of emergency or alternative-route certification on student performance in either mathematics or science as compared to teachers who acquire standard certification. Teacher coursework in both the subject area taught and pedagogy contributes to positive education outcomes. The importance of content coursework is most pronounced at the high school level. Teacher policies need to reflect the reality that teaching is a complex activity that is influenced by