White Paper: Teacher Evaluators Require Formal Training

Stephen Sawchuk writes at the Education Week (3/16) "Teacher Beat" blog that a new paper from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching Project, "formal training of the principals and other observers conducting teacher evaluations is a complex, necessary, and often overlooked component of the systems. ... Such training, including the certification and testing of observers, will help to ensure that judgments of teacher practice are valid and reliable for the purpose of professional development and other decisions, they assert. The paper was written by Catherine McClellan, the research and development project director on the teacher observation component of the Gates project, in which observers scored some 23,000 lessons in 3,000 teachers' classrooms; Charlotte Danielson, a well-known consultant on teacher evaluation, and Mark Atkinson, the founder of professional-development provider Teachscape, which provided funding for the paper."