Informal (Walk Throughs)

The authors estimate the importance of teachers in Chicago public high schools using matched student-teacher administrative data. 

This article describes a school district administrator's research on optimal coaching experiences for classroom teachers. This research was done with the intent of gaining a better understanding of how coaching affects student learning. 

This case study explored the use of the Bug-in-Ear (BIE) tool for undergraduate student-teacher supervision in the hands of a novice BIE2 coach, including the ease with which BIE equipment can be set up and operated by a novice coach and naïve users in the classroom. 

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a classroom-teacher-delivered reading intervention for struggling readers called the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI), designed particularly for kindergarten and first-grade teachers and their struggling students in rural, low-wealth communities. 

Value-Added Models (VAMs) has been embraced by many states and school districts as part of educational accountability systems. Value-Added Assessment (VAA) Models attempt to estimate effects of individual teachers or schools on student achievement while accounting for differences in student background. This paper provides a summary of the American Statistical Associations analysis of the efficacy of value-added modeling in education.

This article discusses instructional coaching as well as the eight factors that can increase the likelihood that coaching will be a real fix for a school. Instructional coaching holds much potential for improving the way teachers teach and the way students learn, but that potential will only be realized if leaders plan their coaching program with care. 

The book presents many examples of Questioning the Author (QtA) in action as children engage with narrative and expository texts to construct meaning.

The book presents many examples of Questioning the Author (QtA) in action as children engage with narrative and expository texts to construct meaning.

This paper introduces analysis techniques and results showing how student growth percentiles, a normative growth analysis technique, can be used to examine the illuminate the relationship between standards based accountability systems and the performance standards on which they are based.

This study used a delayed multiple-baseline across-participants design to analyze the effects of coaching on special education teachers’ implementation of function-based interventions with students with severe disabilities. This study also examined the extent to which teachers could generalize function-based interventions in different situations. 

Teacher professional development is essential to efforts to improve our schools. This article maps the terrain of research on this important topic. It first provides an overview of what we have learned as a field, about effective professional development programs and their impact on teacher learning. 

These five articles begin to build a bridge between literature. specifically, they report on how the use of the indicators derived from value-added models (VAM) actually payout in practice and give carefully consideration to how the design and implementation of teacher evaluation system could be modified to enhance the positive impact of accountability and mitigate the negative consequences,

This paper examines the issue of efficacy of value-added measures in evaluating teachers. This question is important in understanding whether value-added analysis provides unbiased estimates of teachers’ impact on student achievement and whether these teachers improve long-term student outcomes.

This paper evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records.

The purpose of this overview is to provide information about teacher coaching as it is used in schools, the research that examines this practice as a method of teacher professional development, and its impact on student outcomes.

The purpose of this overview is to provide information about the role of formal teacher evaluation, the research that examines the practice, and its impact on student outcomes.

The purpose of this paper on value-added research in education is to define this type of research, provide an overview of how it has been conducted, and discuss its benefits and limitations.

The purpose of this overview is to provide information about informal evaluation as a practice in schools, and the current understanding of research related to informal teacher evaluation to improve teacher performance and student outcomes.

The purpose of this overview is to provide an understanding of the research base on professional development and its impact on student achievement, as well as offer recommendations for future teacher professional development

This study examines the theoretical and practical implications of ranking teachers with a one-dimensional value-added metric when teacher effectiveness varies across subjects or student types.

The study compares the effectiveness of different routes to teaching. It finds there is no significant difference in the effectiveness of teachers who were traditionally trained when compared to teachers who obtained training through alternative credential programs.

This text was written to help the reader acquire a base of knowledge about classical psychometrics and to integrate new ideas into that framework of knowledge.

This article addresses the topics of staff assessment, teacher supervision, and professional development.

The Framework for Teaching identifies those aspects of a teacher's responsibilities that have
been documented through empirical studies and theoretical research as promoting
improved student learning.

In this article the authors examine some design principles to guide policy-makers and school reformers who seek to promote learner-centred professional development which involves teachers as active and reflective participants in the change process.

A growing number of researchers are studying whether value-added measures can do a good job of measuring the contribution of teachers to test score growth. Here I summarize a handful of analyses that shed light on two questions.

The Three-Minute Classroom Walk-Through offers a practical, time-saving alternative that impacts student achievement by cultivating self-reliant teachers who are continuously improving their practice.

Value-added estimates of teacher or school quality are increasingly used for both high- and low-stakes accountability purposes, making understanding of their limitations critical.

This paper exams teachers' views on unions, tenure, pay-for-performance, alternative certification, and other issues and finds that while most teachers are strong supporters of standards, a sense of vulnerability, along with fears of politics and favoritism, make them loyal to the tenure system, loyal to their unions, and highly skeptical about pay tied to student test scores.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) returns decision making for our nation’s education back where it belongs – in the hands of local educators, families, and communities – while keeping the focus on students most in need.

This paper describes a continuous learning model of principal and superintendent support. The model places a premium on engagement at all levels of the system on shaping a focused culture of instruction within their schools.

This book shows how principals and other school leaders can develop the skills necessary for teachers to deliver high quality instruction by introducing principals to a five-part model of effective instruction.

This article aimed to present frameworks and practices coaches can use with classroom teachers to facilitate the implementation of evidence-based interventions in schools.

This paper report on work estimating the stability of value-added estimates of teacher effects, an important area of investigation given that new workforce policies implicitly assume that effectiveness is a stable attribute within teachers. 

Interview and survey data from six school districts that have recently implemented new evaluation systems with classroom observations provide evidence that principals tend to rely less on test scores in their human capital decisions. 

This paper describe a few promising assessment technologies tat allow us to capture more direct, repeated, and contextually based measures of student learning, and propose an improvement-oriented approach to teaching and learning. 

This study draws on in-person observations of principals collected over full school days over two different school years in a large, urban district to investigate how principals allocate their time across different instructional leadership tasks, and how instructional time use is associated with school effectiveness.

This study examines the associations between leadership behaviors and student achievement gains using a unique data source: in-person, full-day observations of principals collected over three school years. The study finds that principals’ time spent broadly on instructional functions does not predict student achievement growth. Time spent on informal classroom walkthroughs negatively predicts student growth, particularly in high schools.

A research synthesis confirms the difficulty of translating professional development into student achievement gains despite the intuitive and logical connection. Those responsible for planning and implementing professional development must learn how to critically assess and evaluate the effectiveness of what they do.

The precise method of attributing differences in classroom achievement to teachers is the
subject of considerable discussion and analysis.

This paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of school quality and quantity.

The authors examine the relationships between observational ratings of teacher performance, principals’ evaluations of teachers’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills and test-score based measures of teachers’ productivity. 

Hattie’s book is designed as a meta-meta-study that collects, compares and analyses the findings of many previous studies in education. Hattie focuses on schools in the English-speaking world but most aspects of the underlying story should be transferable to other countries and school systems as well. Visible Learning is nothing less than a synthesis of more than 50.000 studies covering more than 80 million pupils. Hattie uses the statistical measure effect size to compare the impact of many influences on students’ achievement, e.g. class size, holidays, feedback, and learning strategies.

NSDC opens the door to professional learning that ensures great teaching for every student every day

This paper examines how well principals can distinguish between more and less effective teachers. To put principal evaluations in context, we compare them with the traditional determinants of teacher compensation-education and experience-as well as value-added measures of teacher effectiveness.

This study draws on 32 interviews from a random sample of teachers and 2 years of survey data from more than 12,000 teachers per year to measure their perceptions of the clarity, practicality, and cost of the new system.

This book provides research as well as case studies of successful professional development strategies and practices for educators.

The authors examined the effectiveness of self-monitoring for increasing the rates of teacher praise statements and the acceptability of using this technique for teachers. This study's results support the use of self-monitoring to increase effective teaching practices, namely praise, and further demonstrates high social validity for the participant and the students.

this study presents and apply a framework for measuring the cost of coaching programs to 3 schools. Then the study discusses strategies for reducing the average cost of instructional coaching. 

The education policy community is abuzz with interest in value-added modeling as a way to estimate the effectiveness of schools and especially teachers. Value-added models provide useful information, but that information is error-prone and has a number of other important limitations.

This study evaluated the extent to which the large performance gains shown on KIRIS represented real improvements in student learning rather than inflation of scores. 

This study review the empirical literature on teacher coaching and conduct meta-analyses to estimate the mean effect of coaching programs on teachers’ instructional practice and students’ academic achievement.

The authors conducted a comprehensive review of research to identify the impact of coaching on changes in preservice and in-service teachers’ implementation of evidence-based practices.

This study examined the effects of in-service plus follow-up coaching on first grade teachers’ accurate delivery of three research-based strategies during math instruction.

This study examined the effects of in-service support plus coaching on kindergarten teachers’ accurate delivery of group instructional units in math.

The seven guiding principles in this manuscript offer research-based directions for literacy coaching.

Three questions are addressed. First, what are the principles behind creating optimal teacher incentives, and how close do the actual structures in Sweden and the US conform to the ideal ones? Second, how much is performance affected by creating incentives for current teachers, and how much by changing the pool of teacher applicants? Third, do teacher preferences align with those of their students and of society in general, and if not, why not? Associated with each of these questions are policy implications that may remedy existing distortions.

Using longitudinal data from a cohort of middle school students from a large school district,
we estimate separate “value‐added” teacher effects for two subscales of a mathematics
assessment under a variety of statistical models varying in form and degree of control for
student background characteristics.

This study analyzed three urban districts' efforts to improve the instructional quality and performance of their schools. The study also assessed the efforts made in four: (1) promoting the instructional leadership of principals; (2) supporting the professional learning of teachers, in particular through school-based coaching models; (3) specifying curriculum; (4) and promoting data-based decision making for planning and instructional improvement.

This study demonstrates mathematically that the use of such “construct-shifting” vertical scales in longitudinal, value-added models introduces remarkable distortions in the value-added estimates of the majority of educators

In this brief, we discuss what is and is not known about how well value‐added measures level the playing field for teachers by controlling for student characteristics. 

In this brief, we discuss the challenges of using value-added to evaluate teachers of students with disabilities.

The current study extends recent value-added modeling approaches for longitudinal student achievement data Lockwood et al. [J. Educ. Behav. Statist. 32 (2007) 125–150] to allow data to be missing not at random via random effects selection and pattern mixture models, and applies those methods to data from a large urban school district to estimate effects of elementary school mathematics teachers. 

Value added modeling has become of interest to policymakers interested in evaluating teacher performance.  The authors argue that the models work well when the schools in the sample are homogenous but as heterogeneity of the student population  increases estimates of teacher effects are likely to confounded.

This study documents the implementation of research-based strategies to minimize the occurrence of reading difficulties in a first-grade population. Three strategies were implemented. 

This paper reports on the results of the analysis of an additional year of evaluation and student achievement data at some research.

This book examines principal leadership with the focus on formative assessment. The book looks at efforts to improve student performance through Formative Classroom Walkthoughs.

How important are teenagers' cognitive skills in predicting subsequent labor market success? Do cognitive skills pay off in the labor market only for students who go to college? Does college benefit only students who enter with strong basic skills? These questions are often part of current policy debates about how to improve the earnings prospects for young Americans. 

This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility.

This study examines the impact of 2 forms of professional development on prekindergarten teachers' early language and literacy practice: coursework and coaching. 

The goal of the study was to examine the effects of coaching or professional development coursework on teacher knowledge and teacher practice.

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ESEA Reauthorization

This research use data from a four-year experiment in which teachers and students were randomly assigned to classes to estimate teacher effects on student achievement.

Effects of a 1-semester professional development (PD) intervention that included expert coaching with Head Start teachers were investigated in a randomized controlled trial with 88 teachers and 759 children. 

This study evaluted the impact of coaching on the implementation of an intervention.  Coaching with higher rates of performance feedback resulted in the highest level of treatment integrity.

This paper disentangles the impact of schools and teachers in influencing achievement with special attention given to the potential problems of omitted or mismeasured variables and of student and school selection. 

The purpose of this study is to examine the relative impact of different types of leadership on students’ academic and nonacademic outcomes.

This research considers relationships between student achievement (knowledge and cognitive skill), teacher efficacy (Gibson & Dembo, 1984), and interactions with assigned coaches (self-report measures) in a sample of 18 grade 7 and 8 history teachers in 36 classes implementing a specific innovation with the help of 6 coaches.

The author develop falsification tests for three widely used VAM specifications, based on the idea that future teachers cannot influence students' past achievement. 

Most children with autism rely on schools as their primary source of intervention, yet research has suggested that teachers rarely use evidence-based practices. To address the need for improved educational outcomes, a previously tested consultation intervention called the Collaborative Model for Promoting Competence and Success was evaluated in a 2nd randomized controlled trial, with the addition of a web-based group. 

Using data from 35 seventh-grade teachers and 2,026 students across seven schools, we employ VA methods to measure teacher contributions to students’ motivational orientations (mastery and performance achievement goals) and their mathematics performance. 

In this article, we describe and report on the results of a study in Texas that tested 2 models of professional development for classroom teachers as a way of improving their practices and increasing the reading achievement of their students. 

The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System determines the effectiveness of school systems, schools, and teachers based on student academic growth over time.

The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System determines the effectiveness of school systems, schools, and teachers based on student academic growth over time. Research conducted utilizing data from the TVAAS database has shown that race, socioeconomic level, class size, and classroom heterogeneity are poor predictors of student academic growth. Rather, the effectiveness of the teacher is the major determinant of student academic progress.

This paper reviews the empirical research on the effectiveness of performance feedback as a means of influencing teacher implementation of interventions.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of multilevel support on first-grade teachers' accurate use of research-based strategies during beginning reading instruction and the extent to which teachers maintained use of these strategies. 

In his 1964 paper, "Course Improvement through Evaluation, " Lee Cronbach urged another step: a most generous inclusion of behavioral - science variables in order to examine the possible causes and effects of quality teaching He proposed that the main objective for evaluation is to uncover durable relationships -those appropriate for guiding future educational programs.

Peer observation aims to support the sharing of practice, and builds self-awareness about the impact of one's teaching practice in order to affect change.

Summative assessment is an appraisal of learning at the end of an instructional unit or at a specific point in time. It compares student knowledge or skills against standards or benchmarks. Summative assessment includes midterm exams, final project, papers, teacher-designed tests, standardized tests, and high-stakes tests. 

the authors examine how the five profiled systems are addressing assessment quality, evaluating teachers in nontested subjects and grades, and assigning teachers responsibility for particular students. The authors also examine what is and is not known about the quality of various student performance measures used by school systems.

In this article, the authors describe key features of the multi-tiered support (MTS) continuum of intervention and assessment and present a case study to illustrate implementation of some components of the framework with four middle school teachers.

This study examined the effectiveness of a classroom teacher intervention, the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI), in helping struggling readers in kindergarten and first grade. This intervention used biweekly literacy coaching in the general education classroom to help classroom teachers use diagnostic strategies with struggling readers in one-on-one 15-min sessions.  

"The Mirage" describes the widely held perception among education leaders that they already know how to help teachers improve, and that they could achieve their goal of great teaching in far more classrooms if they just applied what they knew more widely.

The authors examine the causes and consequences of the status of teacher evaluation and its implications for the current national debate about performance pay for teachers. The report also examines a number of national, state, and local evaluation systems that offer potential alternatives to current practice.

This study examines the School Administration Manager (SAM) project, that focused on changing the conditions in schools that prevent principals from devoting more time to instructional leadership.

In this study, the results of five training studies evaluating the effects of a coaching program for use in Dutch primary and secondary schools are described.

This report examines the pervasive and longstanding failure to recognize and respond to variations in the effectiveness of teachers. 

U.S. public policy has increasingly been conceived, debated, and evaluated through the lenses of politics and ideology. The fundamental question -- Will the policy work? -- too often gets short shrift or even ignored. A remedy is an evidence-based policy--a rigorous approach that draws on careful data collection, experimentation, and both quantitative and qualitative analysis to determine what the problem is, which ways it can be addressed, and the probable impacts of each of these ways. 

A preliminary survey of 32 school districts identified as having highly developed teacher evaluation systems was followed by the selection of 4 case study districts.

 Due to the increased need to support teachers' use of evidence-based practices in multi-tiered systems of support such as RTI [Response to Intervention] and PBIS [Positive Behavior Interventions and Support], coaching can extend and strengthen professional development. This paper describes a multi-level approach to coaching and provides implications for practice and research.

The purpose of this study is to examine research to answer the question, What is the impact of teacher professional development on student achievement.

This second edition includes an expanded set of classroom observation tools, moving from 23 to 40 and more linkages to the job-embedded nature of the informal classroom observations.