Lee Shulman's vision of good teaching includes nurturing students' moral and spiritual development, civic engagement, and socialization. High-stakes tests do not embody standards. When evaluating and rewarding teachers, mentoring and monitoring functions should be separated. National Board for Professional Teaching Standards improvement incentives…

Rather than burdening administrators, educators are discovering that a well-designed evaluation system can effectively merge professional development with quality assurance in teacher evaluation. New participatory evaluation approaches include differentiated systems, multiyear cycles, and active teacher roles (via portfolios, professional…

Why cannot teachers be "incentivized" like lawyers and salespeople? The seemingly logical link between employee production and compensation is debatable and highly subjective. Educators' jobs involve more than teaching academic subjects and often extend beyond the measurable. Input/output reward systems ignore basic human-motivation dynamics. (MLH)

Georgia's plan to reward overall school improvement requires staff of participating schools to demonstrate attainment of four challenging goals: academic achievement gains, resource development, educational programming, and client involvement. This pay-for-performance program helped one elementary school achieve 90 percent of its goals the first…

Through the 1950s, principals, supervisors, and education professors determined ideal teachers' attributes. Since then, teachers have been envisioned as analytic, effective, dutiful, competent, expert, reflective, satisfying, reflective, diversity-responsive, respective, or combinations thereof. Districts must create evaluation systems…

Teaching portfolios are not just scrapbooks of random assignments and student work samples, but represent teachers' evolving reflections and analyses measured against rigorous standards. Thoughtful reflection, not a color printer, is the key to portfolio success. Tips on assembling suitable "artifacts" and handling anxiety and time constraints are…

Although 360-degree feedback is no panacea for improving schools, it provides educational leaders with data to help them perceive, reflect, articulate, and analyze their own behavior, based on data from a full circle of constituents, including themselves. Face-to-face coaching is a mandatory component. (MLH)

A Utah district's assessment committee created an innovative, yet conservative teacher-evaluation program using direct measures of teacher performance. Teachers can choose among various data sources: parent surveys, student surveys, student-achievement data, documentation of professional activity, and teacher tests. Datasets are preferred over…

Widespread dissatisfaction caused a Nevada district to reexamine and revamp its teacher-evaluation process. The new system, which assumes teacher participation in goal setting helps teachers become self-reflective practitioners capable of adjusting their practices, has four domains: planning and preparation, classroom environment, instruction, and…

Experienced teachers in North Carolina benefit from an evaluation system that sets clear expectations and combines traditional evaluation with individual growth opportunities. The model is based on a regional educational laboratory's 10 years of experience in research and development in formative evaluation. Teacher self-assessment is a key…

About 5 to 15 percent of teachers in 2.7 million public-education classrooms are marginal or incompetent. Assistance plans offer structure, purpose, and remedial help. Plans have six components: definition of the problem, statement of objectives, intervention strategies, a timeline, data-collection procedures, and final judgment. (MLH)

Analyzing teaching on the basis of student learning is consistent with cognitive perspectives on teaching that consider what students should know and be able to do, what the teacher can do to foster such learning, the teacher's success at achieving desired student outcomes, and how the teacher should improve instruction. (MLH)

Mount Holyoke College's discussion-based Lenses on Learning seminars consist of 3 10-hour sessions that invite administrators to consider new ideas about mathematics, learning, and teaching and applications for their practice-supervising teachers, supporting their professional development, suggesting assessment approaches, addressing…

Shortly after a beloved teacher's death, a Wellesley, Massachusetts, high-school principal decided to create a wall of recognition displaying the names of people (retired at least 2 years) who had made significant contributions. The recognition ceremony is combined with a dinner and spring concert and has become a community-building event. (MLH)

Exiled to Mussoorie, India, Tibetan students participating in a poetry workshop wrote persuasively about collective rage, communal loss and gratitude, and the shared wish to return home. The author, an American English professor, helped them express their individuality (a non-Tibetan value) while preserving their cultural identity. (MLH)