Creating a system to give teachers feedback is one of the most important changes the U.S. can make to its K-12 education system, according to Bill Gates annual letter to the public.
Gates argues that tools that measure teacher’s strengths and weaknesses and failures and successes would give teachers a better idea of what works and what doesn’t in their classrooms, creating better teachers and students who are more likely to succeed. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has come up with its own measurement tool that he’d like to see used.
Starting in 2009, the foundation funded a project called Measures of Effective Teaching, or MET, that worked with 3,000 classroom teachers to better understand how to build an evaluation and feedback system to help teachers improve. In January 2013, we announced the final results of the MET project. The report concluded that there were observable, repeatable, and verifiable ways of measuring teacher effectiveness. MET highlighted several measures that schools should use to assess teacher performance, including student surveys and reports from trained evaluators who observe teachers at work.
Read the letter here.
Do you think having a system to provide teacher feedback could have an impact on education as we know it?