Why is teaching documentation so important right now in the educational context? In the United States, teaching, along with research and service, is a crucial component of someone's professional profile in academia. As part of the review process for faculty reappointment or promotion, most institutions require evidence of effective teaching. This…

This study showed extent of rigor at North Louisiana school sites using a Likert Scale questionnaire and observation rubric, derived from the Rigor/Relevance Framework and COMPASS rubric, respectively. Cognitive thinking is highly regarded by educators and employers in a global economy as students use it to infer, connect, and apply knowledge to…

This action research study describes the problem of practice as a dysfunctional evaluation system that is not meeting the needs of the teachers or the administration within the Central Valley Elementary School District. The identification of the problem of practice led to the development of a research focus examining elementary-level teachers'…

Digital literacy skills are crucial for students to master to prepare for a world with an ever-increasing reliance on technology. Yet this need is mostly going unmet by American public schools. Furthermore, there is not an adequate definition of a digitally literate teacher or a document administrators can use to determine the level of digital…

The purpose of this sequential transformative study was to elucidate the negative experiences of teachers with performance evaluations and to juxtapose the intended use of current popular teacher evaluation reform movements to the evident implementation. One may quickly assume that negative experiences with evaluation are a result of…

In response to research demonstrating that Tennessee Extension agents desired a performance appraisal system that better reflected their jobs and provided for appraisers' professional development, a committee of University of Tennessee and Tennessee State University personnel undertook a 2-year initiative to revise the performance appraisal…

In changing accountability contexts, policymakers are engaging in international dialogue and collaborative efforts with new opportunities to reframe conversations about how to measure teacher quality and to (re) design and implement evaluation systems accordingly to ensure that they are fair, useable, feasible, and accurate. This study examined…

This study turns a rhetorical lens on the debate about how best to use value-added modeling (VAM) in teacher evaluation by addressing the question, Which arguments legitimize the dismissal of expert caution about proposed education reforms? My rhetorical analysis of a corpus of nonacademic texts (e.g., newspapers, magazines, political speeches)…

New career principals are tasked with many sensemaking opportunities and often rely on their peers to assist with these sensemaking processes, engaging in a form of newcomer socialization. This study investigates how two first year elementary school principals in the US state of Michigan become socialized to their new roles as school leaders by…

As states are continuing to refine teacher evaluation models, there are opportunities for student learning in the arts to be documented and connected with teacher evaluation. The Tennessee Portfolio of Student Growth in the Arts ("the Portfolio") has provided a new perspective on documenting the relationship between student growth and…

The need for evaluating teachers' performance is ongoing; only recently it has been done in a systematic way. The most common method employed is a teacher evaluation tool that has been validated in practice. Such a tool is the Danielson framework for teaching (FFT). The FFT is used to evaluate teachers in Illinois, among other states; in that…

For decades, school districts across the Nation have been pressured to close the achievement gap among students and have been held accountable for student outcomes. According to past researchers, there is a need to revise completely the teacher evaluation practices used in the 1980s and 1990s to better measure teacher effectiveness. More recently,…

This joint statement, representing the collective position of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), and the College Section of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), aims to: (1) Outline collective…

There is a taken-for-granted assumption in teacher education that providing the teacher with observation tools will help develop the expertise that is necessary for quality education. When the history of science and cultural studies are considered, it is possible to think about learning to observe as a political practice; generating principles to…

Learning and assessment that drives learner success should be a key tenet of all initial teacher education programmes. Initial teacher education providers in Aotearoa New Zealand must use an assessment framework to ensure that graduating teachers meet the Teaching Council standards. As a part of a review of their assessment practices, academic…