Supporting Effective Teaching in Tennessee:
Listening and Gathering Feedback on Tennessee’s Teacher Evaluations
Recommendation 3
Address challenges with the current quantitative and qualitative measures of teacher effectiveness.
We recommend:
3(a) Addressing immediate issues with the quantitative student growth portion (35 percent) of the evaluation system:
I. he Board and Department should continue to develop meaningful assessments of non-tested grades/subjects that
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are aligned with Common Core State Standards and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and
Careers (PARCC) assessments. We recommend these assessments link educators with the subset of students in the
school with whom they work so that the data are representative of teachers’ individual performances. This change may
not be appropriate for all. Educators who work with students throughout the school, such as instructional coaches and
librarians, should continue to use school-wide TVAAS composites as they align with their roles and responsibilities.
II. s these assessments are developed, teachers who do not yet have individual value-added or comparable data
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should temporarily be given the option of increasing the weighting of the qualitative measures while decreasing
the weighting of the school-wide value-added composites (see example below). Based on the feedback received
from educators however, school-wide value-added data serve as a powerful tool to drive collaboration and the
sharing of best-practices, and should be maintained as a meaningful component of the evaluation.
Existing Option
Student
achievement
data (15%)
Schoolwide
value-add data
(35%)
Potential option that increases the
qualitative component (illustrative example)
Student
achievement
data (15%)
Qualitative
component
(50%)
Schoolwide
value-add data
(10%)
Qualitative
component
(75%)
III. oving forward, the Department should develop a process to continually assess and improve the measures of
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student growth used in the teacher evaluation system. This process should include a review of the latest research
and educator input. The following issues should be examined through this process:
a. e recommend that over time, the State Board and Department consider allowing teachers who have consisW
tently achieved high levels of student growth to have the option for greater weight to be given to their student
growth measures as a proportion of their evaluation.
b. he Department of Education should work to ensure that educators have earlier access Ѽ