Critical Conversations: Principals’ Experiences Evaluating and Coaching Teachers in a Next-Generation Evaluation System

• In Event: Investigating Policies and Practices That Promote Teacher Quality

Abstract

Objectives & Framework
Teacher evaluation systems have been characterized by binary rating scales that fail to differentiate among teachers and provide them with little information about areas for professional growth (Weisberg, Sexton, Mulhern, & Keeling, 2009). Recent evidence that teachers are the most important school-level factor in students’ learning (Sanders & Rivers, 1998; Rockoff, 2004) has spurred federal education policymakers, states and districts to invest in redesigning teacher evaluation. With these new systems, states and districts aim to more accurately evaluate teachers’ performance and to provide them individualized feedback.

This new generation of teacher evaluation systems places primary responsibility on principals to evaluate teachers’ classroom instruction and to provide them with feedback about their professional practice. However, open questions remain about whether these new systems address challenges that disincentivized principals from rating teachers as unsatisfactory under past evaluation systems. Furthermore, it is unclear whether new systems facilitate meaningful feedback and whether principals have the training and skill necessary to communicate feedback effectively.

Data & Methods
We explore these questions by conducting a mixed methods study of principals’ experiences evaluating and providing feedback to teachers in a large urban school district during the first year of implementing a next-generation evaluation system. We surveyed principals about their perspective of the true distribution of teacher ratings at their school and their prediction of the ratings they would assign prior to system implementation. We compare these perceptions and predictions to the actual distribution of teacher ratings in each school. We then interviewed 30 principals to understand their experiences rating teachers and providing them feedback under the new system. We selected participants using a stratified purposive sampling design (Marshall, 1996) to ensure we spoke with principals with diverse backgrounds working across a range of school types (Kruger, Witziers, & Sleegers, 2007).

Results
We find that, on average, principals’ believed that 6.6% of teachers at their school should be rated as “unsatisfactory” and 21.9% fall under “needs improvement” on the district’s new four-category rating scale. In practice, principals assigned far fewer teachers to these two lowest rating categories. Principals commonly cited several causes for their reluctance to rate teachers as low-performing including: the extra documentation and attention to detail required; their lack of expertise in certain content areas or grade-levels; the difficulty of having critical conversations, particularly with teachers previously rated as satisfactory; and their philosophy of rating teachers on their potential for growth rather than current performance. Principals expressed mixed perspectives about the potential of the new evaluation system in the district to improve instruction, and reported spending little time meeting with teachers to provide feedback in person.

Significance
The experiences and perspectives of principals’ are critical to understand when designing evaluation systems that rely on them to accurately rate teachers and provide meaningful feedback to improve practice. This study illuminates the challenges principals continue to face in the next generation of teacher evaluation systems and suggests ways in which states and districts can better support principals to be effective evaluators and coaches.

Authors

• Matthew A. Kraft, Brown University

• Allison Gilmour, Vanderbilt Peabody College