In unsurprising news, Linda Darling-Hammond’s latest piece in HuffPo is terrific. Explaining the Teaching and Learning International Survey results, she writes,
The survey shows that American teachers today work harder under much more challenging conditions than teachers elsewhere in the industrialized world. They also receive less useful feedback, less helpful professional development, and have less time to collaborate to improve their work.
When teaching is the single biggest factor affecting student achievement, we have no excuse as a society but to better support teachers. Notably, in the countries that performed better in TALIS, teacher support often comes in the form of a more robust, supportive, and collaborative teacher evaluation system.
All U.S. teachers stated that formal appraisal is used in their schools, based on classroom observations; feedback from parents, guardians, and students; and review of test information. This is not very different from the TALIS average. What is different is the nature of the feedback and its usefulness. American teachers found the feedback they received to be less useful for improving instruction than their peers elsewhere. Interestingly, they received much more of their feedback from busy principals (85 percent of U.S. teachers vs. a TALIS average of 52 percent) and much less from other teachers or assigned mentors (27 percent vs. a TALIS average of 42 percent), who can generally offer more targeted insights about how to teach specific curriculum concepts and students.
In contrast to high-performing countries, U.S. principals are too busy and so provide unhelpful feedback (read: checklists); peer mentorship between teachers is rare; and support is untargeted. Yet high quality feedback, peer mentorship, and targeted feedbackare essential to teacher growth.
So what can we do about it?
- Teachers are already heading to Twitter, blogs, and innovative new conferences likeEdcamps to find support that they can’t find in their schools.
- Leading U.S. principals are supporting each other in implementing new state-mandated evaluation systems in ways that promote growth and go beyond mere compliance.
- At TeachBoost, we work every day to build an instructional leadership platform that schools can use to streamline the teacher observation and feedback process, facilitate meaningful collaboration among teachers, and target PD to educators’ specific needs.
Teachers and administrators have shown their desire to remedy this situation, and we have the tools to do it. What’s stopping us?
