By Liam Goldrick, Director of Policy
Teachers are concerned about their day-to-day work and about the future of their profession. We know this through our own and other educator surveys.
More than 1.2 million educators have shared perceptions about their school environment through NTC's Teaching and Learning Conditions Initiative. What teachers say matters most for their work is supportive school leadership, sufficient resources, and professional learning opportunities.
The MetLife Survey of the America Teacher suggests that teacher morale has fallen to a 25-year low and that a majority of teachers feel under "great stress" several days a week. Such educator perceptions may be impacting the pipeline into teaching.
The number of students in teacher training programs has decreased sharply around the country, including in California, Illinois, Indiana and Pennsylvania. Does such an enrollment decline portend a longer-term problem for staffing our schools? Is it the proverbial "canary in a coal mine"?
Perhaps teacher layoffs during the economic downturn dissuaded candidates from entering the teaching profession and we soon will see an uptick. But some educators point to time demands, challenging teaching conditions, and accountability pressures as disincentives that aren't going away. Other educators believe that some contemporary policy reforms also play a role.
Cristina Duncan Evans, a Baltimore high school teacher, writing in Education Week, argues that by "simultaneously raising the bar, and the stakes ... we're setting up a system where the number of teachers deemed ineffective is about to increase substantially, at the same time as we make it easier to fire ineffective teachers."
One solution to address these educator concerns is to recommit ourselves to the twin purposes of teacher evaluation reform: Movin' it *and* Improvin' it. To date, more policy and implementation energy has been spent on constructing teacher performance ratings than on ensuring that the feedback provided to teachers is regular, individualized and actionable. Even with this prioritization, a new Brookings Institution report suggests that teacher observation ratings still need more work.
Teacher ratings - even if laboriously detailed through a post-observation tool - don't necessarily help teachers to improve. But few states and districts train or certify evaluators in providing effective instructional feedback. Collectively, we've failed to build capacity within new evaluation systems to respond to the professional needs of teachers.
At NTC, we've addressed this shortcoming. In a 2013 policy paper, we encouraged Illinois to increase the frequency and depth of feedback and support to beginning teachers. The state responded by adopting guidance on aligning evaluation with induction and other instructional supports. This year, NTC worked with the Minnesota Department of Education to develop a training series and resources that will build the capacity of teacher evaluators to engage in professional growth conversations.
Let's face it: Feedback within evaluation has been dangerously under-imagined. It's often thought of as a soliloquy by an evaluator than as a collaborative conversation. Regardless of the data used, feedback should be immediate, tied to specific teaching standards, focused on evidence about the teacher's practice, and constructive rather than critical. Badly delivered feedback can be destructive.
Evaluation is most effective when it is integrated with other processes that support professional growth - such as new teacher induction - and when it occurs within a strong professional community that cultivates collective professional accountability.
If the true intent of evaluation is not simply to exit a small percentage of teachers from the classroom but to enhance the instructional capacity of all educators, then we need to work harder at building those systemic elements and related professional learning processes that inform excellent teaching.
