Exploring How Elementary School Teachers Create Their Own Professional Evaluation Protocol

• In Event: Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Agency/Empowerment in Assessment and Policy Making

Abstract

Federal and state education policies increasingly demand that teacher evaluations both identify effective and ineffective teachers and facilitate teacher development. However, there is little in the research literature on the synthesis of teacher learning and teacher assessment to inform the design of teacher assessments that can meet both of those goals. This research examines how a group of charter elementary school teachers designed their own protocol, how they prioritized the two goals, and what tensions they experienced in the early stages of the implementation. The data indicate that while teachers were empowered to design a protocol that was meaningful to them, their experiences of it were impacted by lack of clarity about its possible consequences.

Author

• Marcy Berger, University of Rochester