The Gates Foundation has been funding the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, and is now releasing reports related to what they are learning about providing valid and reliable feedback to teachers for professional development and improvement.
Here is an excerpt:
"Many states and school districts are looking to reinvent the way they do teacher evaluation and feedback, and they want better tools. With the help of nearly 3,000 teacher-volunteers, the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project is evaluating alternative ways to provide valid and reliable feedback to teachers for professional development and improvement." The report examines five different approaches to classroom observations in order to determine the value of each in evaluating teaching quality, in coordination with student achievement data. The aim is to provide a more realistic and nuanced approach to the evaluation of teaching quality using a combination of measures.
"Our experience in scoring thousands of videos leads us to offer the following guidance to the many states and districts that are in the midst of redesigning the way they do classroom observations:
• First, to achieve acceptable levels of reliability with classroom observations, observers should demonstrate their ability to use the instruments reliably before observing...
• Second, to produce reliable feedback on a teacher's practice, states and districts will need to observe a teacher during more than one lesson...
• Third, to monitor the reliability of their classroom observations and ensure a fair process, districts and states will need to conduct some observations by impartial observers and compare the impartial scores with the original scores...."
Download the full report: http://www.metproject.org/downloads/MET_Gathering_Feedback_Research_Paper.pdf