[MUSIC] So there are all these different variables that are at play in teaching and in learning. My sense is that we are just beginning to scratch the surface of beginning to understand how this whole thing works. And so developing an evaluation system that says quality teaching, this is working, this isn't working, sort of seems akin to doing brain surgery in 1902. Not something that I would want to sit down and have done on myself because it just doesn't seem like there's enough science or understanding behind what's going on. Clearly we need to start somewhere, right, in beginning to try and understand this. But I think one of the challenges is sort of stepping back and admitting that this is a social dynamic complex relationship. It doesn't lend itself to static, highly controlled, systematic kinds of study. And frankly, we need to come up with a different model for being able to research and understand effective teaching before we can say good, bad. Because we don't know. I mean, some of the things that we know about teaching and learning is that, who the child is, what kind of environment the child has outside of school, huge impact. Impact of teachers, large impact. Impact of peers, reasonable to large impact. How do you throw all of those things together? >> Sometimes, because education is complex, we want to do one size fits all. We want to do cookie cutter solutions, and we want to be able to say, okay, here are the ten characteristics of a great teacher, and here they are everybody and check, check, check, check, check and then you can use this anywhere. Whereas, research shows that a great teacher in one school isn't necessarily a great teacher in another school, that it's a complex dynamic of the leadership and the team and the students and the curriculum and all those pieces come together. So I definitely believe in, we should do everything we can to attract, and this is back to the Finland solution, right? Finland and Singapore, those countries attract really, really hard working, really, really, really brilliant people to teaching. That's what we need. >> Well, I think it's interesting that we're talking about schools. And we're talking about places where there's supposed to be learning taking place. And that we want to create young people who are lifelong learners. But then we don't think about that being a qualification, or a non-negotiable for the people who come into the building. If we're going to expect that we're going to produce young people who are always going to be eager to learn and always going to push themselves, then we want to hire and retain teachers and counselors and leaders that are the same. And if you believe that you're a lifelong learner. And you believe that that's a process and that it's on going and that you can always improve your practice. Well, it's almost atypical then to say, well, I've gotten a score back. It says that I'm not good enough and I'm going to be okay with that, or I'm going to dispute it or I'm going to say that that can't be a requirement for me to get better. So I think we've got to be ready to have hard conversations with people both on the front end and during the year. So we're recruiting people who want to come into buildings that realize their practice is going to be pushed and that it's going to be a non-negotiable, that you have conversations about how to get better, and that you reflect upon your own teaching capacity. And that there's an expectation. And we've come to that as a team, both administrators and teachers. And we think that this is what we need to do to get better. And if you don't meet that threshold, and either you're A, unwilling to work hard enough to meet it, or B, maybe even more challenging, that you have been working hard to meet that threshold and you have it, we need to have a conversation. But that centers back to the professionalism of teaching, right? Maybe everybody isn't meant to be a great teacher. We wouldn't think that everybody could become a surgeon. We wouldn't think that everyone could become a mechanical engineer. These are challenging skill sets that are needed. You need to be extremely competent in these areas. I don't know that we look at teaching like that. >> Teacher development, for me, has been key and really important, as well as teacher evaluation. But the way that I've looked at it is really through the lens of helping teachers to see themselves. So, how do I do that? Through video, through script. And then, of course, through looking at student work, because at the end of the day, did your students learn what you needed them to learn in this experience? Based on that data, if they did, what happened that you did really well to get them there? And if not so much, let's sift through and find out the language that was unnecessary or the language that you didn't say [LAUGH] that needed to happen to support student growth. So, for me, using that medium has been the way to move teachers down along the continuum and help them to push their own practice. It has helped me to see the nuances in the art of teaching. So I don't necessarily like or enjoy all of the rubrics that quantify all of it. I appreciate the language of it because it can help articulate and highlight some of the nuances of it. But, for me, if we want the teacher to grow, they have to see themselves and be willing to have a conversation about what they said or did and then what the student work looks like that reflects their teaching experience. >> There's something inherently complicated and complex in the teaching and learning space, more complicated than in a whole lot of other interactions that we are evaluated on. The teaching and learning experience depends not just on the teacher, but on the student, and the interpersonal way that they together build the student's skill. So I think the educators, the teachers, are distrustful of anything that attempts to downplay how unique and complex their work is. So even the observation rubric, teachers will say, but that doesn't get at whether he's learning persistence, some of those non-cognitive skills. These are only, and it doesn't get at what happens if on the day that I'm observed, if the two troublemakers show up in full force and are very troublesome. A whole lot of the other days that go on in my life, my classroom runs really smoothly. But on this particular day, it didn't. And so you are reducing the complexity of what I do every day to a single number, and that doesn't feel right. So I think part of that is part of people's pushback is rooted in that. Part of people's pushback is also rooted in the things that we don't know about the assessments that are used. Whether student growth really works, should we take into account any student background characteristics when we do that? What about what else is going on in the school? Should I be held accountable for disruption in my classroom when the whole school is chaos and there's running in the hall? So it's a lot of, teacher evaluation lays a lot of emphasis on the teacher, but it doesn't necessarily take into account a lot of the other things that impact the very act of teaching and learning. >> I think what pushes teachers out are one, sort of the lack of respect and trust that is put in them as professionals. So they're told to do a lot of things. It's leadership, I think we have a capacity issue with school leaders. I think it's the schedule, the lack of leadership opportunities for teachers, the lack of resources for teachers, the lack of collaboration time. Our younger teachers, they want to collaborate. And they want to work with others in trying to figure out these really complex issues of how to teach every child, and how to implement new curriculum and new standards, and they don't have that. They don't have that time. They feel crunched for time. I think all of those issues really impact sort of the turnover rate. >> I think one of the key lessons we've learned a lot about new evaluation systems is where is the buy in coming from and sort of who's mandating these new systems. So when they feel like the compliance exercises they had before were not seeing much change in practice, we're really now trying to get deeper in five districts around the country to better understand. These are leading districts who maybe aren't your traditional suspects but who are doing really important work helping teachers learn from their evaluation results so they can actually improve their teaching. So we're trying to go deep in these districts about what the feedback and support that those teachers are getting looks like. And you start to realize just how hard this is to do well. I mean a new evaluation system is much more a big change management exercise than something that feels like a simple tweak. I mean we're talking about teachers and principals having conversations about their classrooms that they just haven't had before. So one key learning we're uncovering right now, by visiting these five districts, is a sense of how much training needs to go in to help these principals or observers give meaningful feedback. And it's just like any, I think, organization out there. Some people are more skilled at giving direct feedback than others. In terms of the positive, keep it up, you're doing great here. Versus the constructive feedback, here are one or two things you can do to improve your craft. And when we see that, that's when teachers are fully bought into these systems. But I would say, some principals are stronger at that and not all training, unless it's really regular and frequent, is going to help people get better at that. >> So I think first it's a conversation of what matters, right? What do we actually want to assess in teacher accountability? So it could be a combination of test scores, of course. Couldn't it also be attendance for your home room class, or if you're in high school, for each class period that you have? It could be grades, percentage of students that are passing your class. It could be percentage of students who are on track. We spoke about an advisory situation earlier. It could be the percentage of students that are in your advisory that are passing all their classes. It could be the percentage of students that have behavior incidents in your class, or the number of incidents that are reported. Well, now that might lead us to under-report, right, what might be happening in our class. But we could still do an assessment of that. It could be on-time arrival, especially if we're thinking about secondary schools and high schools. How many of our students are coming to your class on time? It could also be student evaluations. There's research that suggests that our students know, they know which teachers are challenging them and are the most effective, and which aren't. And so I think probably student surveys could have an impact. But we'd want to have a conversation about any of these metrics, so that everybody on both sides of the fence have conversation about it, feel that their voice has been heard, and that you get to agreement about what matters. Then I think there'd be, how do you assess that? Because once you want to start assessing those things, I think the teachers would need to be able to say, we feel that this is a fair assessment. And if so, then when I get a score back on that assessment, I buy into it, I accept it. I think that's a pretty accurate reflection of how well I've done, and how well I can do. So that'll help the conversation. Last, is time. It's going to be time, either professional development during the school day or after, in which I get the kind of support as a teacher, whether it's from my instructional team, whether it's from my principal, whether it's from an instructional coach that helps me improve in the area that both sides have identified as one for improvement. It can't be enough for the teacher that, I'm just not good at differentiation, or that I'm not using data to drive instruction enough in my classroom. There has to be be, okay, I can get better in this area and here's the support plan or here's my own individualized learning plan for me to get better as an educator. I think without that, it ends up being empty. And that the teacher just feels like this is someone who's coming into my classroom, they're giving me a score, and they're just going to move on to the next thing. >> What one of my pet peeves is when people talk about teachers unions being sort of monolithic, and you don't know, I think preconceived notions about how teacher unions are going to behave in certain districts are oftentimes counterproductive. We're working closely with the teachers union in Syracuse around new teacher leadership roles. We're working closely with a number of the state union leaders in race to the top states to successfully implement new evaluation reform. So Colorado, Illinois, you have other examples where union leaders have really helped lead the charge. And helped add a lot of quality into the conversations that might be missing. At the same time, you have other union leaders that sometimes need to be pushed along more, or worry about some of the repercussions for their members that aren't always as productive. Or aren't always as focused on what's going to be best for kids in classrooms. So that's my initial caveat there. I think, in general, the teachers and their unions want these systems to work when they're being implemented well, but there are examples out there where certain design features have been put into place that just don't make a lot of sense. And so I think a key in doing that is working together to refine those systems. So one of my first jobs when I joined Education First was leading all of the conversations on teacher evaluation in Connecticut. And we brought reform groups, we brought the union groups, and we brought the management groups all to the table to wrestle through what the new system should look like. I think that goes along way to ensuring a collaborative approach to implementation. >> We need teachers that believe in data and that their data is actually telling them something about what their students are learning and the effectiveness of their teaching. If they're willing to honor that and see that, then they will go back to the drawing board over and over and over again and redesign lessons for mastery. [MUSIC]
