Background/Context: Despite noted difficulties with defining and assessing teacher dispositions, U.S. state education departments and national accreditation agencies have included dispositions in mandates and standards both for determining teacher quality and for assessing the quality of the teacher preparation programs that certify them. Thus,…

Background or Context: Federal and state reforms have expanded accountability systems for school districts, schools, and teachers. However, there is little evidence that the implementation of new teacher evaluation systems relying on measures of student learning and measures of teaching practice, with differentiated performance categories and…

Over the past decade, there has been a movement toward increased accountability, focusing on teacher performance, in U.S. education. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss student learning objectives (SLOs) as one component of high-stakes teacher evaluation systems, within the context of learners with special needs. We describe SLOs and their…

This article uses empirical data to consider the consequences of particular characteristics of instruction and testing in high school for the modeling and estimation of value-added measures of school or teacher effectiveness. Unlike Mathematics and Reading for most elementary and middle school grades, there is a lack of annual testing of students…

Background/Context: The evolution of validity understandings from mid-century to now has emphasized that test validity depends on test purpose--adding consequence considerations to issues of interpretation and evidentiary warrants. Purpose: To consider the tensions created by multiple purposes for assessment and sketch briefly how we got to where…

Background/Context: Peer Assistance and Review (PAR), or peer review as it has historically been called, has existed in a handful of school districts since the early 1980s. In 1999, California became the first state to pass PAR legislation; at that time, a major district had not implemented the policy in over a decade. Setting: This is an in-depth…

Examined the best approach to the development of procedures for assessing beginning teachers, reviewing studies on teacher thinking, development, learning, and knowledge; examining studies on new approaches to teacher evaluation and on issues of validity and reliability; and proposing a framework with 15 implications for the development of…

Teacher supervision is suffering from a legacy of being affiliated with an outmoded integration of science and technology. Dialectical supervision, which emphasizes empowering teachers with ways of knowing that involve continually confronting themselves and searching for more responsive and less dominant educative practices, is proposed as an…

An alternative to the consumptive approach to reform is a productive model which utilizes practitioners' knowledge and seeks ways to enhance this knowledge. A dialogical evaluation method, such as horizontal evaluation, is one way to encourage teachers to recover what they know and to articulate and assess this knowledge. (IAH)