In fall 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project to test new approaches to recognizing effective teaching. The project's goal is to help build fair and reliable systems for teacher observation and feedback to help teachers improve and administrators make better personnel decisions. With funding from the foundation, the data collection and analysis are led by researchers from academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, and several private firms and are carried out in seven urban school districts. Although the project is ongoing (the final report will not be released until winter 2011-12), the researchers report their findings as they become available in order to inform the important reform work already under way in states and districts around the country. The researchers currently have four general findings to report. First, in every grade and subject they studied, a teacher's past success in raising student achievement on state tests (that is, his or her value-added) is one of the strongest predictors of his or her ability to do so again. Second, the teachers with the highest value-added scores on state tests also tend to help students understand math concepts or demonstrate reading comprehension through writing. Third, the average student knows effective teaching when he or she experiences it. Fourth, valid feedback need not be limited to test scores alone. By combining different sources of data, it is possible to provide diagnostic, targeted feedback to teachers who are eager to improve. (Contains 3 footnotes.) [For "Learning about Teaching: Initial Findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project. Research Paper. MET Project," see ED528382.]