With a push from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, other nonprofits, and the federal Race to the Top funding opportunities, 20 states are revamping their teacher evaluation systems. One tool they will likely include in developing better systems for evaluating teacher instruction is digital videotaping.
Videotaping is expected to be used to enhance the value-added assessment, a model used by many school districts to determine the contribution each teacher makes to a student's learning in a given year, which is then compared to other teachers' performance. Critics say that the assessment by itself, which is based on comparing students' grades, gives an incomplete picture of a teacher's overall performance.
The notion of videotaping is being explored through Gates-funded research, conducted by social scientists and teachers and headed by Harvard economist Thomas Kane. The videotaped classroom lessons would be scored by education experts and used not only to evaluate teachers, but also to train them on what works and what doesn't in terms of improving student performance. Such videotaping also could help administrators and teachers understand why some teachers are more successful than others. They can then use the successful teachers' videos as models for how to deliver better instruction. The researchers expect to have about 24,000 videotaped lessons by summer. Hundreds of educators will then be trained to score the lessons, a process headed by the Educational Testing Service.
Source:www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/education/04teacher.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a23&pagewanted=print