Value-Added for Improvement

I'm a big proponent of value-added analysis as a component of a useful education data system.  That view is gaining ground, as this article from the December 2004 School Administrator shows.

Let me add some personal knowledge to this part about Chattanooga's use of value-added for professional development:

Using the teachers who show the highest gains as best-practice tutors for other district teachers is exactly what officials in the Hamilton County, Tenn., schools, which include Chattanooga, have been doing for the past several years, says Dan Challener, president of Chattanooga’s Public Education Foundation.

“Through precise research we’ve been able to identify about 75 teachers who consistently posted well above national and local average gains,” he says. “And what we then created is a research network with those teachers.”

The district also has created a set of classroom videos featuring the high-gaining teachers so that if other teachers want to study the classroom practices of those teachers, they can simply refer to the videotapes, Challener explains.

I've talked with the woman who's doing her doctoral dissertation around this project.  In addition to just making the tapes and having the least effective teachers watch, they bring in the teacher on the tape to talk about what they were doing and why.  It turns out that the ineffective teachers do not even see much of what was going on until it is explained to them.  This is in agreement with observations from The Teaching Gap that less-experienced teachers do not pick up on as many things from a tape of a classroom session as do  more-experienced teachers.

Conclusion:  value-added data can help identify highly-effective teachers.  These teacher-leaders can then be engaged in positive deviance professional development programs.  A lesson-study system would serve to infuse successful concepts and approaches throughout school faculties, plus it would increase the sense of pride and professionalism of teachers and the communities perception of excellence in their schools.

Comments

[aschoolyardblogger]

Thanks for the Bellevue link. That is the ticket. I have watched many teachers go through a similar process and it is amazing how they learn and the incredible ideas they come up with. There was one part of the video that was especially memorable to me, and I think a key. The teachers were talking about whether the students will see errors after they use a computer program. One teacher says "remember the kids we are working with". My take was that she wasn't sure those kids would do what the other teachers were thinking they would do. After she sees that kids, will in fact be anxious to look over their original suppositions and see if they still agree, because that is how we all learn, she will begin to let that idea go. Over time maybe she will come to believe that all kids can meet high expections if you let them. You could pay her to take a million classes and read hundreds of books on the same idea but the outcome would never be as quick, nor permanent, as the opportunity to do what she is doing in Bellevue. I love it when I see hope. Thanks.

[Chris C.]

Time is always going to be an issue in developing teaching.

On the other hand, video-based studies are much easier to fit into teachers' schedule than traditional lesson study or other forms of classroom observations. It's the easiest way (that I can think of) to allow teachers to look outside their own classrooms and learn from and with other teachers

Thanks for sharing this, Dave.

[Dave Shearon]

ASYB, Bellevue School District is Washington is doing this. Early release one day every week to provide time for lesson study. See:
http://www.bsd405.org/lessonstudy.html

[aschoolyardblogger]

I have several shelves of video I made over a three year period in high quality classrooms. We often used the tapes over and over, each time asking the viewing teachers to focus on something specific i.e. how did the teacher use her voice to encourage participation? or how did the teacher use time in his favor? I also have video of students where teachers could study their behavior and responses, verbal and physical, during a class session. Actually I still have mounds and mounds of stuff for the kind of study you are talking about. The problem lies in finding the time, and I mean time not stolen, for this type of study to go on. It can't be an afternoon once in a blue moon event but must be ongoing, understood and respected. Teacher by-in and suppost would be there if they had the time.