Strategies for Success

Strategy One: Create an agreed-upon process to define and measure effective teaching.

Our entire initiative rests on the ability to speak in an intelligent and common language about teacher effectiveness. Yet early in our planning we discovered that—despite the national consensus on the important role teachers play in student success—there was no agreement on what constitutes effective practice. Nor was there a reliable measurement tool to evaluate teachers across grade levels and content areas.

We partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, a two-year national research study to develop and test a variety of evaluation tools and technologies.

What grew out of this work is a model of equity and excellence for Memphis City Schools, as well as schools around the nation.

Step 1: What we mean by “Teaching Effectiveness.”

An effective teacher can advance a student one or more grade levels for every year of instruction.

With this outcome in mind, MCS has crafted a definition of teaching effectiveness based on nine behaviors and/or actions that lead to student growth. We are asking all teachers in the district—new and tenured—to use this definition to guide their efforts as they strive to improve instructional practice. 

Step 2: Turning this vision into factors we can measure—consistently and objectively.

This year, we introduced our own tool to evaluate teacher performance. Called the Teacher Effectiveness Measure (TEM), this customized, rigorous metric is both fair and reliable, taking into account the multiple dimensions that go into effective teaching.

The basic components of the TEM:

• 40% Observation of classroom practice
  Objective, behavioral-based assessments by trained observers will be conducted 4 times/year for tenured teachers (for a total of 60 minutes) and 6 times/year for pre-tenured teachers (total of 90 minutes).
• 35% Growth in student learning (or “Value Added”): Test Scores
  TEM focuses on measuring individual student growth and achievement, rather than comparing performance to a universal standard.
• 15% Student achievement
  The state of TN will provide MCS student test scores for individual teachers.
• 5% Stakeholder perceptions (students as well as parents and peers)
  Given that teachers structure class time to engage and challenge students, no one can better inform teachers if the classroom experience is conducive to learning than the students themselves. Surveys are administered twice each year through a tool called TRIPOD.
• 5% Teacher content knowledge
  Teacher Working Groups helped to develop a menu of options to assess how well a teacher understands and applies knowledge of their content area.

This ground-breaking work by Memphis City Schools not only positions the district to attain our goals for improved achievement, but also places us on the leading edge of education reform nationwide.