Supporting Effective Teaching in Tennessee:
Listening and Gathering Feedback on Tennessee’s Teacher Evaluations
Challenges and room for improvement surfaced through the feedback process:
Educators highlighted several challenges of implementing the new evaluation system.
These challenges include:
• Unlike most principals and evaluators, many teachers are not yet convinced of the benefits of the evaluation
system.
• Teachers do not have access to high-quality professional learning and growth opportunities tied to their
performance feedback.
• Approximately two-thirds of teachers do not have individual value-added student growth data for their
grades and subjects. For these teachers, 35 percent of their evaluation is not directly tied to their own individual performance.
• Currently, the 15 percent student achievement measure is not viewed as directly driving effective teaching.
• Educators feel that balancing the evaluation system with existing responsibilities is a challenge for administrators.
• Not all principals and evaluators have developed the instructional leadership skills to effectively assess and
help improve teaching practice.
• Observations of classroom practice do not always capture authentic instruction.
• There is not yet sufficient focus on how the pending implementation of the Common Core State Standards
needs to be reflected in and reinforced by the teacher evaluation system.
Unlike most principals and evaluators, many teachers are not yet convinced of the benefits of the
evaluation system.
In feedback sessions across the state, educators repeatedly said they want to be held accountable to high standards and
desire regular feedback on their performance along with the support to improve. However, many teachers reported feeling
that implementation has stressed accountability over improvement. Only 29 percent of the teacher respondents to
SCORE’s questionnaire agreed that the evaluation system “will have a positive impact on my own teaching practice.”
In some instances, teachers said that the evaluation system left them fe [[