Over the past four decades, research has consistently confirmed what we have known intuitively all along—that no school-based factor matters more for a student’s learning than having an effective teacher.

It’s ironic, then, that we give teachers so little useful feedback on the quality of instruction—the strengths they bring to the classroom and the gaps in their practice that need to be filled.

As part of our education strategy, we have made a commitment to learning from great teachers about what makes them great. To this end, we launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project last fall to explore ways to provide better feedback to teachers on their practice, so that schools can reward and retain those who are most effective, and create new professional development tools to help all teachers improve.

The project is led by independent researchers who will spend two years developing and rigorously validating new ways of identifying effective teaching. Two principles are guiding that work:

• In the grades and subjects where it is feasible to do so, any assessment of the quality of instruction should include student achievement growth as a major component.
• There should be multiple indicators of teacher effectiveness, such as classroom observations and student feedback, not just test-based measures of student achievement. These indicators must be demonstrated to be helpful in identifying classrooms with exemplary growth in student achievement.

Because we do not believe there is one single measure that can capture the range of skills which teachers need—the art and science of teaching—we are testing many different tools for their association with growth in student achievement.

Nearly 3,000 teachers in 7 school districts are participating in the MET project. The project is currently wrapping up the first year of data collection and preparing for the second and final year. So far, the project has collected over 13,000 hours of digital video of classroom instruction, student feedback, and assessments for nearly 100,000 students. We will be reporting the initial results of the project this fall. Ultimately, we hope to provide new tools for those states and school districts that are looking to reinvent their approach to teacher evaluation.

A new white paper articulates the scope and methods of the Measures of Effective Teaching project and describes the calendar for the release of results.

By going beyond the exclusive use of student assessments as a proxy for effectiveness and instead developing a broader set of measures, we hope to more accurately gauge a teacher’s impact on student achievement, and ultimately graduate more students ready for college and career. We are excited about this work and look forward to sharing our findings as they become available.

This short video documentary explores the hopes and aspirations of the partners in the Measures of Effective Teaching grants: