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Friday, January 6, 2012

Gates Foundation report says schools need more than just once-a-year teacher evaluations - The Washington Post

Gates Foundation report says schools need more than just once-a-year teacher evaluations - The Washington Post:

Gates Foundation report says schools need more than just once-a-year teacher evaluations

SEATTLE — Once-a-year evaluations aren’t enough to help teachers improve, says a report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

And school districts using infrequent classroom observations to decide who are their best — and their worst — teachers could be making some big mistakes, according to the second part of a multi-year study from the foundation.

Preliminary results were posted online Friday.

Good teacher evaluations require multiple nuanced observations by trained evaluators. Those results should be combined with other measures, such as student test scores and classroom surveys, to gather enough information to both evaluate teachers and help them improve, the researchers found after