How does your child’s teacher influence academic performance?

by admin | Aug 14, 2012

Education is an important tool that can shape an individual and allow creativity, opportunity and growth.  As a teacher, it is necessary to motivate students and help them recognize their strengths and weaknesses.  Educators are important role models for students and have a big impact on helping shape, create, support and establish students’ strengths, goals and knowledge.  Therefore, it is essential to be aware of the effective qualities, skills and characteristics that one brings into a learning environment.

What makes an effective teacher?

According to research teacher preparation and knowledge of teaching and learning, experience, subject matter knowledge and certification all establish teacher effectiveness.  Teacher preparation is important to their effectiveness in a classroom.  Good quality teacher preparation is important to student academic achievement.  Prepared graduates have a higher likelihood of remaining teachers and providing quality service to their students and to the schools they work in.

What is teacher-efficacy?

Teacher-efficacy is a teacher’s confidence in their ability to help students to learn.  Research shows that teacher-efficacy has an effect on his or her students’ academic performance.  It is important that teachers believe in themselves and in their abilities as a role model and educator, because it plays an important role on their student’s self-perception and performance.  It also helps a teacher communicate more effectively with students as well as with the overall perception of their student’s strengths and weaknesses.  Teachers with self-efficacy have a positive impact on their students’ academic performance.  It is something that all teachers need to build, because it is believed to have an important role on students’ academic performance.

Do teachers’ expectations of his or her students have an impact on students’ academic performance?

Student learning can be positively impacted by the encouragement of teachers to their students.  A teacher’s ideas and expectations of his or her students’ capabilities have an effect on student academic performance and achievements.  If teachers believe in their students, their students begin to believe in themselves.  Students take into effect the beliefs their teachers have on them and accept it as part of who they are and their abilities.  When students are viewed in a negative way by their teachers such as, being lazy, unmotivated and having no abilities, they take on those beliefs about themselves.  Many teachers may not be aware of their actions towards particular students in the classroom but their students become aware of them.  According to research finding, teachers’ beliefs translate into differential behavior toward their students.  For example, teachers who see particular students as highly motivated and highly capable would often make eye contact, smile and lean toward them, and praise and call on them more frequently.

Does teacher motivation affect student performance?

Motivation in infants and young children is very high.  Infants and young children have a big interest in their surroundings and environment.  Unfortunately, as young children get older, they become less interested and enthusiastic about their surrounding and environment.  Learning about their environment seems like an unwanted task and desire.

Student motivation is the desire and interest that a student has to be involved in their learning environment.  There are reasons that affect student motivation.  For example, an intrinsically motivated student looks at the learning activity as an enjoyable process and gets great satisfaction through the process of learning.  A student who is extrinsically motivated looks at the learning activity as something they have to do so that they can get a reward or not be punished.  It is also believed that motivation to learn is determined or affected by modeled behavior and communication of parents and teachers.  Children develop an idea about learning in their home setting.  Children are given a particular message from their homes based on their parents’ encouragement of exploring their world compared to children who are given the encouragement to explore the world around them.  Therefore, children without an encouraging and supportive home setting are less likely to deal with and handle failure, because of their feelings about no self-worth or competence.

Older children have a harder time accepting failure and seeing the positive side of trying to accomplish a goal, whereas, younger children see failure as a positive step to finishing or reaching a goal.  Teachers’ expectations of students also play a big role in motivation of student.  The rules and goals also play an important role on the thoughts and beliefs of the students.  It is important for teachers to view themselves as being able to stimulate student motivation to learn.  Tasks given to students can help increase motivation by being challenging and achievable, and showing students that the skills involved in a task can be used in the real world.  Verbally providing the reasons for the tasks to students is also helpful.  According to research there is a process called Attribution Retraining that includes modeling, socialization and practice exercises and is sometimes used with discouraged students.  Attribution retraining provides students with focus on a task rather than the fear of failure.

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Karen Oquendo, M.S. is the Center Director at PRIDE Learning Center in West Los Angeles.  Karen is a Credentialed Special Education Teacher and Reading Specialist.  Prior to working at PRIDE Learning Center, Karen worked as a Special Education Therapist for New York City Department of Education.   You can visit the PRIDE Learning Center website at www.pridelearningcenter.com or email Karen directly at karen@pridelearningcenter.com

Betsy Combier
betsy.combier@gmail.com
Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

Creating a Comprehensive System for Evaluating and Supporting Effective Teaching by Linda Darling-Hammond



 

With the assistance of Channa Cook,
Ann Jaquith, and Madlene Hamilton
Stanford University
Executive Summary

LINK

Virtually everyone agrees that teacher evaluation in the United States needs an overhaul. Existing systems rarely help teachers improve or clearly distinguish those who are succeeding from those who are struggling. The tools that are used do not always represent the important features of good teaching. Criteria and methods for evaluating teachers vary

substantially across districts and at key career milestones—when teachers complete pre-service teacher education, become initially licensed, are considered for tenure, and receive a professional license.

 A comprehensive system should address these purposes in a coherent way and provide support for supervision and professional learning, identify teachers who need additional assistance and—in some cases—a change of career, and recognize expert teachers who can contribute to the learning of their peers.

This report outlines an integrated approach that connects these goals to a teaching-career continuum and a professional development system that supports effectiveness for all teachers at every stage of their careers.

The Distinction between Teacher Quality and Teaching Quality

In the context of the current interest in measuring teacher effectiveness, it is important to dis- tinguish between teacher quality and teaching quality. Teacher quality might be thought of as the bundle of personal traits, skills, and understandings an individual brings to teaching, including dispositions to behave in certain ways. Teaching quality refers to strong instruction that enables a wide range of students to learn. Teaching quality is in part a function of teacher quality— teachers’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions—but it is also strongly influenced by the context of instruction: the curriculum and assessment system; the “fit” between teachers’ qualifications and what they are asked to teach; and teaching conditions, such as time, class size, facilities, and materials. If teaching is to be effective, policymakers must address the teaching and learning environment as well as the capacity of individual teachers.

Elements of a Teaching and Learning System 
A high-quality system should create a coherent, well-grounded approach to developing teaching, crafted collectively by state and district leaders with teachers and their representatives. In addi- tion to clear standards for student learning, accompanied by high-quality curriculum materials and assessments, this system should include five key elements:

1. Common statewide standards for teaching that are related to meaningful student learn- ing and are shared across the profession: Standards for student learning can focus teachers’ work and learning. They also permit aligned standards for teaching, like those created by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), for accomplished veteran teachers, and the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), for beginning teachers. These should guide preparation, licensing, on-the-job evaluation, and ongoing professional learning.
2. Performance assessments, based on statewide standards, guiding state functions such as teacher preparation, licensure, and advanced certification: Well-designed performance-based assessments, like those created by NBPTS and states like Connecticut and California, have been found both to predict and develop greater effectiveness. Such assessments—which look directly at teachers’ abilities to plan, teach, and assess learning—should be used to make key decisions regarding entry into the profession, readiness to be professionally licensed, and recognition of expertise. In a tiered system, these kinds of assessments can create a career continuum that fosters career development from early preparation to instructional leadership.

3. Local evaluation systems aligned to the same standards, which assess on-the-job teaching based on multiple measures of teaching practice and student learning: Such local evaluation systems should have three components, considered in relation to one another, in an integrated fashion:
 
• Standards-based evaluations of practice based on observations, curriculum plans, assignments, and assessments revealing teachers’ classroom practice. 

• Evidence of teachers’ contributions to the work of their colleagues and the school as a whole. Since student learning gains are a function of teachers’ collective efforts, these valuable contributions should be part of the evaluation process. 

• Evidence of teacher’s contributions to student learning based on multiple sources of information reflecting classroom work and other assessments that are appropriate and valid for the curriculum and for the students being taught.

 4. Support structures to ensure trained evaluators, mentoring for teachers who need addition- al assistance, and fair decisions about personnel actions. These structures should include, at minimum:

 • trained, skilled evaluators with deep knowledge of teaching and learning

• supports, including mentoring, for teachers needing assistance

• governance structures that enable sound personnel decisions

• resources to sustain and monitor the system

5. Aligned professional learning opportunities that support the improvement of teachers and teaching quality: These should link both formal professional development and job-embed- ded learning opportunities to the evaluation system. Evaluations should trigger continuous goal-setting for areas teachers want to work on, high-quality professional development sup- ports and coaching, and opportunities to share expertise.

To transform systems, incentives should be structured to promote collaboration and knowledge sharing, rather than competition, across organizations. Knowledge-sharing is needed to develop not only learning organizations but a learning-oriented system of education in which ongoing evaluation and inquiry into practice are stimulated within and across classrooms, across schools partnered within regions, and within the system as a whole. 

Measuring Student Learning

There is agreement that new teacher evaluation systems should look at teaching in light of student learning. One currently popular approach is to incorporate teacher ratings from value-added models (VAM) that use statistical methods to examine changes in student test scores over time. Unfortunately, researchers have found that:

1. Value-Added Models of Teacher Effectiveness Are Highly Unstable: Teachers’ ratings differ substantially from class to class and from year to year, as well as from one test to the next.

2. Teachers’ Value-Added Ratings Are Significantly Affected by Differences in the Students Assigned to Them: Even when models try to control for prior achievement and student demographic variables, teachers are advantaged or disadvantaged based on the students they teach. In particular, teachers with large numbers of new English learners and students with special needs have been found to show lower gains than the same teachers when they are teaching other students. Students who teach low-income students are disadvantaged by the summer learning loss their children experi- ence between spring-to-spring tests.

3. Value-Added Ratings Cannot Disentangle the Many Influences on Student Progress: –––Many other home, school, and student factors influence student learning gains, and these matter more than the individual teacher in explaining changes in scores.

The limitations of value-added analysis do not mean that districts cannot include evidence of student learning in the evaluation process. Some districts use a variety of other measures of student learning in evaluations of teaching, such as evidence drawn from classroom assessments and documentation like the Developmental Reading Assessment; pre- and post-test measures of student learning in specific courses or curriculum areas (developed by individual teachers, departments, school faculty, or district faculty or staff); evidence of student accomplishments in relation to teaching activities, such as student science investigations, research papers, or art projects. Some districts use evidence from teachers’ careful documentation of the learning of a set of diverse students over time, like that included in NBPTS portfolios.
The key is that the assessments be appropriate for the curriculum and the students being taught. This may mean the use of tailored assessments for certain students—such as English language proficiency tests for gauging the progress of new English learners—and the consider- ation of learning evidence in light of the teaching context.

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