Teacher evaluations are a standard part of the school year, and for good reason. Feedback on performance, including constructive criticism and recognition of excellence, is the hallmark of continuous improvement.
Unfortunately, performing evaluations, collating student surveys, and creating valuable feedback reports for teachers is a time-consuming process. At the same time, it’s so important for professional development and student achievement, that this process should not be rushed.
The good news is that we can make this process more efficient for you! With the use of powerful teacher evaluation software like Eidex PRISM, real-time effectiveness ratings and automatic reports make annual evaluations easy.
How Do Teaching Evaluations Improve Student Achievement?
It’s a well-known fact that teacher effectiveness is the biggest influence on student achievement. In addition, teacher quality is cumulative. If a student has low-quality teachers for several years in a row, the student falls further and further behind. Conversely, a student with successive high-quality teachers will perform at a greater level.
This means that measuring teacher quality accurately and consistently is integral to improving student outcomes. By identifying the strengths and weaknesses of our teachers, and focusing on strengthening the weak areas, we can have measurable influence on student learning.
The main way to identify improvements in teacher effectiveness is to perform teacher evaluation. By evaluating teachers, we can identify best practices and communicate those to the entire teaching staff. We can prevent achievement gaps by pairing lower-performing students with high-performing teachers.
With consistent and regular teacher evaluation, we can have a dramatic impact on student achievement and academic success. But if you ask ten people how to evaluate teacher effectiveness, you’ll get twenty different answers! So, how do we identify quality teachers?
How to Evaluate Teacher Effectiveness
A good teacher evaluation will require multiple data sources. A teacher must answer to several stakeholders, including the students, the school and schoolboard, the parents, even the local community, and these might all tell a slightly different story that contributes to the whole picture. Even then, things like charisma and classroom culture are difficult to describe with a quantitative value.
Here are the best ways to evaluate teacher effectiveness:
Classroom observation is by far the most common method. These can be either scheduled or impromptu and can look at a variety of factors in the actual classroom experience.
Teacher self-evaluation, or self-reflection, simply means asking “what is working in my classroom, and what is not?” and taking steps to improve things that are not going well. By asking the right questions, and giving teachers an opportunity to collaborate on improvements, this is even more effective.
Student surveys can be a powerful tool for actionable feedback. By asking the students what they’ve learned and what topics they are not clear on, or what teaching methods work best for them, we gain insight into what is effectively taught and what needs improvement.
Data analysis is a great opportunity for software solutions. By looking at a student’s historical test scores, we can forecast future scores, and when we see consistent classroom deviation higher or lower than the predicted values, we can use that data to build a picture of teacher effectiveness.
With the onset of the pandemic, there are additional challenges to evaluating the classroom experience, minus the classroom. What creates a compelling and effective strategy in person rarely translates to virtual learning.
How to Evaluate Online Teaching
Online teaching, especially when implemented in a hurried response to a global pandemic, is difficult to evaluate. Teachers who are effective in the classroom may not have the training to provide a quality virtual learning experience. The criteria and standards for evaluating online teaching might not even exist for your district.
Teacher input is very important to this process, as we’d expect many teachers to need additional professional development for online teaching strategies and increasing student engagement.
To evaluate virtual learning, more information is needed to assess whether students have adequate access to the technology and connectivity necessary for online classes, and how that impacts the overall student outcomes.
It’s no surprise that the switch to virtual learning has created many challenges for both teaching and evaluating.
ON-DEMAND WEBINAR: Data for Educator Effectiveness Rating in the COVID-19 World
The Benefits of Using Teacher Evaluation Software
The evaluation process is so important to a school district’s success, but also time-consuming and involved. Is there any way to make it easier?
Absolutely!
With the right tools, you can streamline this process to create visual, valuable feedback that is vital to teacher growth and academic achievement. Software can give real-time information on teacher effectiveness and generate reports at the click of a button.
With Eidex PRISM, continuously gathered evaluation data is transformed into teacher effectiveness ratings and connected with student performance metrics. PRISM translates this into real-world actionable goals for improvement, with compelling visualizations to help communicate your needs to school leaders and other stakeholders.
Real-World Applications for Continuous Growth
How are actual educators using Eidex teacher evaluation software to improve academic performance? No one puts it better than Greenville High School principal, Michelle Blaszczynski:
“[Eidex PRISM tools] were able to calculate SGPs [Student Growth Percentiles] for us and inform us where growth has exceeded, met, or not met target. This not only helped us report information externally to celebrate teachers and buildings, but also internally to reflect on areas where we could improve. To top it off, they compact this information into a beautiful report, one that I will share with my Board to honor our teachers’ efforts because you can’t just go on a feeling, it has to be facts.”
At the end of the day, providing quality education is the passion of every school administrator and teacher. With Eidex, we give you tools to make that job easier by using data to identify your most effective teachers and your opportunities for growth and improvement.
DOWNLOAD OUR EBOOK: Comprehensive Guide to Student Growth Measures and Calculations in Educator Evaluations
Learn More About Eidex PRISM
If you’re tired of a clunky teacher evaluation process, Eidex can help you save time and improve professional development goals for your staff. When you connect test scores and teacher evaluation, you clarify the value of cultivating teachers who achieve their full potential. With Eidex PRISM, we give you the tools to see exactly how to do that.
If you’d like to learn more about how to implement PRISM to gain valuable insights into staff performance, we’re happy to provide a free demonstration. We’re also available for any questions, please call us at 844-512-3282 or fill out our contact form.