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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
A proven, practical approach to teacher supervision, coaching, and evaluation that emphasize fairness, equity, and achievement
In the third edition of this longtime bestseller, nationally recognized education leader Kim Marshall offers a framework for supervisors who want to motivate and inspire their colleagues and bring more good teaching to more classrooms more of the time. Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation shows you how to break away from outdated evaluation approaches, describing an innovative approach that enlists teachers and teacher teams in improving the performance of all students.
This thoroughly revised and updated third edition brings Marshall's widely used framework up to date, with even more practical guidelines for implementing effective classroom visits, teacher teamwork around data and curriculum unit planning, professional development, and more. You'll also discover high-tech and low-tech tools that can boost a supervisor's impact and efficiency.
- Discover the bestselling approach to teacher supervision, coaching, and evaluation
- Implement techniques to learn what's really going on inside classrooms
- Implement short, frequent, unannounced classroom visits followed by face-to-face conversations about teaching and learning
- Use rubrics to continuously improve teaching and learning
- Foster professional development with supervision and evaluation techniques that focus on improvement and motivation
- Improve time management, and the effective use of student-learning data
Since the publication of the first and second editions, Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation has been an invaluable resource for K-12 supervisors, instructional coaches, and teacher leaders, as well as trainers and policymakers. The third edition builds on a decade of additional research and work in schools around the world, bringing the ideas into alignment with the rapidly changing world of education, for a timely and beneficial approach to leading today's teachers.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Author
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Facing Facts
The Search for a Better Process
The Bigger Picture of School Leadership
Sixteen Enhancements in the Third Edition
1 A Rookie Principal Learns the Hard Way
Supervision as Seen by a Rookie Teacher
A Quasi-Administrative Role
My Own Ship
The
Aha!
Moment: Massachusetts Standards and Tests
Slim Curriculum Booklets and Achievement Targets
Necessary but Not Sufficient
2 Finding Our Way to a Better System
Supervision Hits a Brick Wall
Managing by Rushing Around
An Idea Is Born
Mini-Observations Take Off
Developing a Style
Keeping Track of Visits
Keeping It Up
Closing the Loop with Teachers
So Far, So Good
A Postscript
3 Design Flaws in the Traditional Teacher Evaluation Process
Not Enough Observations
The Dog-and-Pony Show
Problems with Narrative Evaluations
Opportunity Cost
Power and Passivity
Unhelpful with Teacher Teamwork
Not Linked to Student Learning
The Imperative for Change
4 Mini-Observations 1
Frequent and Short
Systematic
Unannounced
5 Mini-Observations 2
Humble and Curious
Low-Tech
Observant
A Leverage Point
The Bigger Picture
6 Mini-Observations 3
Options for Giving Mini-Observation Feedback
Face-to-Face Debriefs
Brief Follow-Up Summaries
A Kindergarten Reading Lesson
A Fourth-Fifth Grade Gifted Class
A Sixth-Grade Math Lesson
A Seventh-Grade Science Lesson
An Eighth-Grade Math Lesson
A Tenth-Grade English Lesson
An Eleventh-Grade Biology Lesson
Can mini-observations replace traditional evaluations?
Courage
7 Mini-Observations 4
Building a Better Mousetrap
What Are the Domains?
How Many Rating Levels and What to Call Them?
Drafting the Rubric
The Latest Revision
Reducing Teachers’ Anxieties About the Rubric
Faculty Roll-Out
Teacher Goal Setting
Charting All-Faculty Data
Note
8 Mini-Observations 5
Good News—and Ways That Student Learning
Can
Be Used
More Strategies to Keep the Focus on Learning
9 Coaching Results-Focused Teacher Teams
Build Understanding and Trust
Clarify Learning Outcomes
Set a Multiyear Target and Annual SMART Goals
Use High-Quality Tests
Schedule Time for the Assessments and Immediate Follow-Up
Get Teachers Involved in Making Sense of the Assessments
Display Data Effectively
Hold Candid Data Meetings and Plan for Follow-Up
Involve Students in the Process
Relentlessly Follow Up
Summing Up
10 Coaching Differentiation
The Critique
Reframing the Question
A Long-Term Goal: Student Self-Reliance and Intrinsic Motivation
Wrapping Up
11 Coaching Curriculum Unit Planning
Macro Curriculum Planning
Year-End Learning Expectations
Curriculum Unit Plans
Lessons: Where the Rubber Meets the Road
Test Preparation: Good or Bad
Taking Stock
12 Should Supervisors Get Involved During Mini-Observations?
The Importance of Timing
Another Way
Note
13 Time Management
Set Big-Picture Goals and Stay Focused
Continuously Improve Teaching and Learning
Hone Priority Management Skills
14 The Role of the Superintendent
Principal Evaluation Rubric
End-of-Year Rubric Evaluation of Teachers
Time Management
Note
15 A Short Summary, Frequently Asked Questions, and a Wrap-Up
A Short Summary of This Book
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparing Six Theories for Improving Teacher Evaluation
Wrapping Up
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Author
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Begin Reading
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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Praise for Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation
A concise collection of practical ideas on how principals can improve teaching and learning, Kim Marshall is a former administrator who knows from experience how to ensure that teachers receive the support and guidance they need to be effective in meeting the needs of students. An invaluable resource for instructional leaders.
—Pedro A. Noguera, Ph.D.,Dean of Rossier School of Education andDistinguished Professor of Education
In Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation, Kim Marshall challenges the conventional perspective on teacher evaluation, urging us to perceive it not merely as a set of obligatory transactions but as a system capable of transformative leadership moves. This paradigm shift, according to Marshall, holds the potential to cultivate true collaboration, strategic actions grounded in research, and ultimately, improved learning for teachers, effective leadership decisions, and tangible progress in student achievement.
Kim Marshall introduces a novel approach, emphasizing mini-observations and reflective post-visit conversations as key components. These elements, he argues, enable school leaders to construct a comprehensive understanding of teachers' strengths and areas for improvement. Notably, this method relies on multiple data points rather than a single observation, providing a more nuanced and accurate evaluation.
What sets this text apart is its practicality. Kim Marshall offers actionable suggestions that render it an invaluable resource for both emerging and experienced school leaders. The proposed strategies empower leaders to navigate the complexities of teacher evaluation with finesse, making informed decisions based on a holistic understanding of each teacher's performance.
Moreover, the text advocates for transformative changes in the existing evaluation system, positioning it not as a mandatory exercise but as a catalyst for positive outcomes. Kim Marshall's innovative ideas, outlined in this book, present a compelling argument for reshaping our approach to teacher evaluation. It is, undeniably, the resource needed to usher in a new era of evaluation that prioritizes the growth and success of students, teachers, and school leaders alike.
—Dr. Gloria McDaniel-Hall, Associate Professor, National Louis University, Chicago, IL
Ample research now tells us that principals can be crucial to student learning, especially so for disadvantaged students. This book helps us understand how principals can matter, embedding a discussion of high-impact strategies for improving instruction into an insightful overview of the most relevant research, information that should be part of every principal's training.
—Charles M. Payne, Henry Rutgers Professor of Africana Studies and Director of Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-Newark
This book serves as a manual for everyday supervisors looking to help teachers improve their practices. The micro-observation strategies will help us build the muscles to coach teachers toward closing the knowing-doing gaps of planning and implementing effective lessons.
—Dr. Hoa Tu, Superintendent, New York City Public Schools
Kim Marshall's Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation is the most practical, compelling source you'll find on this topic. If we heed his irrefutable case for frequent classroom visits and specific, targeted feedback, then instructional quality—and student outcomes—will absolutely improve.
—Mike Schmoker, Ed.D., Author, Speaker, and Consultant
One of the great joys of teaching and leadership is the opportunity to watch a master at work. Great teachers, as Marshall demonstrates, enthrall us not because are magicians, but because they work hard, take feedback, and improve every day. The challenge is this: How do we take our current teaching staff to that level? How do be build the next generation of expert teachers? In this Third Edition of Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation, Marshall provides the roadmap to do just that. His mini-observation system has a uniform goal of instructional excellence, but does not take a one-size-fits-all approach to classroom observation. Best of all, Marshall provides teachers and administrators not only with a goal of effective practice, but also with specific guidance on many traditional practices to be avoided. If we aspire to see more great teaching, then we need to see more effective observation, feedback, and support for teachers at every level. Whether you are observing veteran staff members or the growing number of new teachers who have had little or no pedagogical training, this book will help. To be clear, this is not just a book for administrators – it is a lifeline for teachers who are weary of ambiguous and inconsistent evaluation systems. They deserve a roadmap for how to improve, and this book is the GPS to great teaching.
—Douglas Reeves, Author, Fearless Schools
Kim Marshall, an award-winning principal, author, consultant, and mentor to school leaders, leverages his extensive career experience into this compendium of practical wisdom on the important topic of teacher observation and evaluation. Marshall begins by debunking many current supervision and evaluation practices, then builds a case for more demonstrably efficient and effective ways of offering feedback that actually improves teaching and learning. This updated version of his classic book includes new insights, including the potential of Artificial Intelligence to support the teacher observation/feedback process. I consider this 3rd edition of Rethinking Teacher Evaluation and Supervision an indispensable guide to any current or aspiring school leader or instructional coach.
—Jay McTighe, Education author and consultant, and Coauthor of the Understanding by Design® series
“Kim Marshall’s new book is a master class in teacher supervision and evaluation. All current and prospective supervisors stand to benefit from its deep insights, clear explanations, and spot-on guidance.”
—Susan Moore Johnson, EdD, Jerome T. Murphy, Research Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Massachusetts
Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation
How to Shift the Conversation to Coaching, Continuous Improvement, and Student Learning
Kim Marshall
Third Edition
Copyright © 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights, including for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies, are reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permission.
Chapter 3 - “Let’s Cancel the Dog-and-Pony Show” in Phi Delta Kappan, November 2012
Chapter 3 - “How Principals Can Reshape the Teaching Bell Curve” in The Journal of Staff Development, August 2015
Chapter 4 - “Rethinking the Way We Supervise, Coach, and Evaluate Teachers” in Education Gadfly, February 20, 2019
Chapter 7 - “Getting Teacher-Evaluation Rubrics Right” in Rubric Nation: Critical Inquiries in Education, Tenan-Zemach & Flynn (editors), Information Age Publishing, 2015
Chapter 8 - “Test Prep: The Junk Food of Education” in Education Week, October 1, 2003
Chapter 8 - “Using Student Learning in Teachers’ Assessments” (with Douglas Reeves) in Edutopia, April 30, 2018
Chapter 8 - “In Praise of Assessment (Done Right)” in Phi Delta Kappan, March 2018
Chapter 8 - “Merit Pay or Teacher Accountability” in Education Week, September 1, 2010
Chapter 9 - “Interim Assessments: A User’s Guide” in Phi Delta Kappan, September 2008
Chapter 10 - “Rethinking Differentiation: Using Teachers’ Time More Effectively” in Phi Delta Kappan, September 2016
Chapter 12 - “Should Supervisors Intervene During Classroom Observations?” in Phi Delta Kappan, October 2015
Chapter 13 - “The Big Rocks: Priority Management for Principals” in Principal Leadership, March 2008
Chapter 14 - “Quality Assurance: How Can Superintendents Guarantee Effective Teaching in Every Classroom” in The Councilgram, March 2013
Chapter 15 - “The Big Picture: How Many People Influence a Student’s Life?” in Phi Delta Kappan, October 2017
Chapter 15 - “Mini-Observations: A Keystone Habit” (with Dave Marshall) in School Administrator, December 2017
Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available
ISBN 9781394265251(Paperback)ISBN 9781394265268(epub)ISBN 9781394265275(epdf )
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © kali9/Getty Images; © SolStock/Getty Images
For Lillie and Dave, skillful and intrepid teachers
The Author
Kim Marshall was a teacher, central office administrator, and principal in the Boston public schools for thirty-two years. He now advises and coaches principals, teaches courses and leads workshops on instructional leadership, and publishes a weekly newsletter, the Marshall Memo, summarizing ideas and research from sixty publications (www.marshallmemo.com). Marshall has written several books and numerous articles on teaching and school leadership. He is married and has two adult children; both are teachers: one in Boston, the other in Philadelphia.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I am grateful to my wife, Rhoda Schneider, for her support, wise counsel, and keen eye, and to Lillie Marshall, Dave Marshall, Katherine Marshall, and Laura Marshall.
Christie Hakim at Jossey-Bass believed in this book from the beginning and persuaded me to write it, and she and her colleagues contributed mightily to first edition, including Leslie Tilley (special thanks for helping reformat the rubrics), Julia Parmer, Hilary Powers, Kate Gagnon, and Pam Berkman. The second edition benefited from close attention from Kate Gagnon and Tracy Gallagher. The third edition was the brainchild of Ashante Thomas, and I am grateful for her encouragement, guidance, and attention to detail.
A loyal group of friends and thought partners have shaped this book over the years: Roshone Ault, Justin Baeder, Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, Roland Barth, Dick Best, Kitty Boles, Joanne Bragalone, Barney Brawer, Andrew Bundy, Lorraine Cecere, Emily Cox, Rudd Crawford, Larry Cuban, Joan Dabrowski, Charlotte Danielson, Jenn David-Lang, Gerry Degnan, Ted Dooley, Ellie Drago-Severson, Moshe Drelich, Karen Drezner, Rick DuFour, Kathleen Elvin, Alexandra Fagan, Sarah Fiarman, Kathleen Flannery, Ray Fugate, Michael Fung, Vikki Ginsberg, Amelia Gorman, Mary Grassa O'Neill, Maureen Harris, Mary Ellen Haynes, Bill Henderson, Jay Heubert, George Hill, Jeff Howard, Toni Jackson, Shahara Jackson, Mark Jacobson, Barry Jentz, Fred Jones, Lois Jones, John King, Khalek Kirkland, Sandi Kleinman, Diane Lande, Gerry Leader, Doug Lemov, Mike Lupinacci, Nick Marinacci, Keith McElroy, Jay McTighe, Carol Merritt, Nancy Milligan, Sandy Mitchell-Woods, Pedro Noguera, Mairead Nolan, Penny Noyce, Bill O'Neill, Maria Palandra, Andy Platt, Brandon Ray, Doug Reeves, Mark Roosevelt, Josh Roth, Mary Russo, Jon Saphier, Mike Schmoker, Pamela Seigle, Mark Shellinger, Ken Shulack, Vicki Spandel, Sue Szachowicz, Wyllys Terry, Nick Tishuk, Pete Turnamian, Betsey Useem, Mike Useem, David Vazquez, Jamey Verilli, David Ward, Bob Weintraub, Rick Weissbourd, Grant Wiggins, Dylan Wiliam, and Sara Zrike.
Finally, I am grateful to the teachers at the Mather School, who tutored me as these ideas germinated, and to the budding principals, seasoned coaches, and honchos in New Leaders for New Schools, who have contributed in ways they cannot imagine: Cami Anderson, Monique Burns, Jann Coles, Ben Fenton, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Kris Klasby, Mark Murphy; Jon Schnur, and Vera Torrence; my New Leaders coaching colleagues; and all New Leaders principals.
Finally, my special thanks to Athie Tschibelu, who went above and beyond the call of duty to help launch one of the first components of this book.
Introduction
Principal evaluation of teachers is a low-leverage strategy for improving schools, particularly in terms of the time it requires of principals.
—Richard DuFour and Robert Marzano
This quote strikes many educators and parents as shocking and counterintuitive. Isn't giving teachers evaluative feedback an essential part of a principal's toolbox for improving teaching and learning?
But when I ask groups of educators what helped them improve in their early years in the classroom, their responses (via anonymous polling) tell a different story. Here's what participants in a recent webinar had to say:
I see similar results every time I ask this question, with “supervisors’ formal evaluations” often getting zero votes. Far more likely to improve teaching and learning, say educators in a wide variety of settings, is informal input from colleagues, mentors, coaches, supervisors, students, various forms of professional development, and a modest acknowledgment of their own training and talent.
Facing Facts
This begs the question of whether teacher evaluation can be a player in improving teaching and learning in K–12 schools. As I've coached principals, given presentations, and read research for the Marshall Memo in the new millennium, several hard truths have emerged:
Hard Truth 1. Students learn a lot more from some of their teachers than from others. The egalitarian teacher norm described by Susan Moore Johnson (2012)—we're all equal in a very tough job—is belied by major differences in achievement from classroom to classroom. The results of a Tennessee study summarized here show a fifty-two-point spread in achievement between students who spent three years with the least-effective and most-effective teachers.
Source: Sanders and Rivers (1996).
What made the difference? It was the cumulative impact of specific teaching practices used hour by hour, day by day, week by week, month by month. Books like The Skillful Teacher by Jon Saphier et al. (2008) and Teach Like a Champion 3.0 by Doug Lemov (2021) have unpacked the techniques that explain why students learn so much more in some classrooms than in others.
Hard Truth 2. Every school has a range of teaching quality from highly effective to not so effective. Variation can be represented by a simple bell curve, which has a slightly different shape from school to school but conveys the same basic idea: there's always a range of teaching effectiveness.
British researcher Dylan Wiliam said it well (2018, p. 183): “Today in America the biggest problem with education is not that it is bad. It is that it is variable. In hundreds of thousands of classrooms in America, students are getting an education that is as good as any in the world. But in hundreds of thousands of others, they are not.”
In hundreds of thousands of classrooms in America, students are getting an education that is as good as any in the world. But in hundreds of thousands of others, they are not.
Hard Truth 3. Vulnerable students have a greater need for good teaching than their more-fortunate classmates. Yes, a rising tide of effective instruction lifts all boats, but the maritime metaphor doesn't convey an important characteristic of schools: skillful teaching makes a bigger difference for students who walk in with any kind of disadvantage, including poverty, neighborhood violence, quarreling parents, learning disabilities, health issues, and ineffective teaching the year before. The study summarized here compared the impact of effective and ineffective teachers on students with different levels of preparation as they moved through fifth, sixth, and seventh grades:
Source: Bracey (2004).
On the left are three cohorts of students who were lucky enough to have effective teaching three years in a row. They achieved at similarly high levels, even though some (the left-hand bar) started with much lower achievement than others.
The three student cohorts on the right are a matched sample who had three years of ineffective teaching. Those who started out with high and middle achievement (the two bars on the right) were still doing quite well at the end of seventh grade despite lower-quality teaching, but those who started out with low skills fell way behind.
With mediocre and ineffective teaching, we see a widening proficiency gap—the so-called Matthew effect, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
This study and others like it show that vulnerable students disproportionately benefit from good teaching—the so-called equity hypothesis (Fullan, 2003). With mediocre and ineffective teaching, we see a widening proficiency gap—the so-called Matthew effect, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Conversely, with effective and highly effective teaching we see more-equitable student outcomes and narrowing proficiency gaps.
Hard Truth 4. Traditional teacher evaluations rarely have an impact in teaching and learning. This figure lays out the components of the “clinical supervision” model that's been standard practice in K–12 schools for almost a century:
We'll go into more detail on the design flaws in this model in Chapter Three, but one problem jumps out: if a single evaluation takes four hours, a supervisor with twenty to twenty-five teachers (a typical caseload) is spending a lot of time each year on an activity that does very little to improve teaching and learning.
In some schools, these four hard truths converge in a perfect storm, with grievous effects on students’ education:
Many students have academic and other disadvantages.
Too much teaching is mediocre and ineffective.
Teachers are not effectively supervised and evaluated.
Tragically, this scenario is most common in economically embattled communities where the need for good teaching is greatest. The pandemic heightened these equity issues, and even though the emergency has passed, its lingering effects on student behavior and learning loss continue to erode teachers’ and administrators’ morale. It's more urgent than ever that schools use the most effective methods!
The Search for a Better Process
None of this is news to seasoned educators and policymakers, and experts have been hard at work looking for ways to improve teacher evaluation and student outcomes. Here are ten theories of action that have been used in some schools around the US, each followed by my concerns about its viability:
Double down on the traditional teacher evaluation model, investing heavily in training supervisors to ensure inter-rater reliability.
Spending more time preparing administrators on a deeply flawed model will not improve outcomes. There might be more uniformity in write-ups, but they will remain an ineffective method for improving teaching and learning, taking up large amounts of supervisors’ time that could be better spent, and adding to their cynicism about the process.
Use detailed rubrics to 4-3-2-1 score individual lessons.
Rubrics are helpful descriptions of the many facets of teaching, but they're not suitable to evaluating a single lesson, during which a teacher can demonstrate only a small part of the overall palette of effective instruction. Rubrics are best used to evaluate each teacher's work at the end of the school year - more on this in
Chapter Seven
.
Bring in outside evaluators to backstop principals’ evaluations.
The idea is to have supervisors with more objectivity to supplement on-site supervisors, but educators from outside don't know the culture, curriculum, and personalities of a school when they parachute in and can't possibly visit classrooms often enough to give fair and accurate evaluations. Better to put the resources into supporting school-based supervisors with manageable caseloads and a better evaluation model.
Use anonymous student surveys as a significant part of teacher evaluations.
Although students speak the truth about their teachers and their input can provide valuable pointers (and sometimes stinging rebukes), making surveys high-stakes (in Pittsburgh schools they were 15 percent of teachers’ evaluations) can corrupt the process and prevent teachers from listening to their students’ helpful suggestions.
Inspect lesson plans and classroom artifacts to ensure quality teaching.
Yes, teachers need to be prepared for each lesson, but lesson execution is what matters. The time supervisors spend reading and commenting on lesson plans is better spent visiting classrooms (they can spot-check the lesson plan) and talking to teachers about how each observed lesson went. Asking teachers to submit “evidence” of their planning and assessments is also a poor use of their time—and a poor use of administrators’ time going through reams of paperwork or digital files.
Use “real-time coaching” with supervisors intervening during problematic lessons.
This idea will be discussed in more depth in
Chapter Twelve
; suffice it to say that this runs the risk of undermining teachers’ authority with students and making teachers dread every visit by their supervisor. Except for dire emergencies, why not wait till after the lesson to talk to the teacher?
Evaluate teachers via lesson videos they submit.
Videos can be powerful tools for reflection and professional development, but making them the medium for evaluation can become a digital dog-and-pony show. Most teachers will (naturally) hand in videos of excellent lessons and administrators won't have a sense of how things are going for students on a daily basis.
Use back-of-classroom cameras so supervisors can evaluate lessons remotely.
Watching teachers via camera smacks of Big Brother and deprives the observer of the ineffable elements of a classroom that can only be picked up by being there in person, walking around, looking at classroom assignments, and chatting with a few students about what they are learning.
Use test-as-data transcripts and artificial intelligence (AI) to evaluate lessons.
AI is amazing and can provide data on some aspects of a lesson—for example, who's doing most of the talking, even the emotional valence of classroom exchanges—but again, the physical presence of the supervisor in classrooms opens up so much more.
Use value-added measures (VAMs) and student learning objectives (SLOs) to evaluate teachers on their students’ learning gains.
There's no question that talking about student learning should be central to the supervisory and coaching process, but experts have shown that VAM and SLO methodology has serious flaws, making them a suboptimal way of having that conversation. We'll go into this in more detail in
Chapter Eight
.
Each of these ideas is problematic, either in concept or in execution, which reflects the frustrating juncture at which US educators find themselves today. So many well-intentioned reform ideas have failed to deliver on their promise; Charles Payne documented this in painful detail in his book, So Much Reform, So Little Change, Harvard University Press (2022).
So many well-intentioned reform ideas have failed to deliver on their promise.
So where does that leave us?
The focus has returned from grandiose nationwide plans and technological fixes back to the front lines: schools and districts, principals and superintendents and heads of school. Do they have no choice but continuing with the traditional teacher evaluation process?
I believe we can do better.
Let's start by imagining what teacher evaluation would look like in an ideal world. Every teacher wants their students to finish the year with the knowledge, skills, and habits of mind to be successful at the next level. To evaluate teachers on this aspirational goal, principals and other supervisors would need to answer three questions:
The intended curriculum.
Are students being taught the right content for this grade or course, at the appropriate level of rigor?
The taught curriculum.
Is the teacher using the most effective instructional strategies to teach that content?
The learned curriculum.
Have all students made good progress toward mastery?
This is a tall order, but for the sake of argument, let's see how well the traditional evaluation process answers each question:
Supervisors catch glimpses of the intended curriculum by looking at a few lesson plans before observations.
They sample the taught curriculum in one or two evaluation visits.
To assess whether the curriculum has been learned, supervisors look at students’ work during classroom visits and perhaps analyze their grades and standardized test scores (although collective bargaining agreements often limit using student achievement as a factor in teacher evaluation).
In short, traditional evaluations are a woefully inadequate strategy for providing information in these three areas.
This book proposes a different approach to assessing each teacher's effectiveness, summarized here:
The goal is all students learning and succeeding. To get a handle on the intended curriculum, supervisors work with teacher teams on their curriculum unit plans. To assess the taught curriculum, supervisors make frequent, short, systematic, unannounced classrooms visits (mini-observations) and get additional insights in face-to-face conversations with teachers after each visit. Anonymous student surveys provide additional low-stakes insights on day-to-day teaching.
The goal is all students learning and succeeding.
To see how well students are learning, supervisors look over students’ shoulders during mini-observations, check in with teachers and look at student work during debriefs, and closely monitor teacher teams as they look at student assessments and work. All this information is pulled together, with input from each teacher's self-assessment, in detailed rubric scoring at the end of each school year.
This approach involves fundamental changes in the way supervisors handle the professional dynamic with teachers:
From infrequent, announced, full-lesson observations to short, frequent, unannounced visits
From extensive note-taking during full lessons to jotting insights on a possible “leverage point” in each mini-observation
From lengthy formal write-ups to brief face-to-face conversations including appreciation and coaching, followed by a brief written summary
From guarded, inauthentic communication with teachers to candid give-and-take based on authentic observations
From teachers saying, “Let me do it my way,” to teacher teams continuously asking, “Is it working?”
From one-right-way evaluation criteria to constantly looking at new ideas and practices
From infrequently evaluating
teaching
to continuously analyzing and discussing
learning
From top-down accountability to teachers and teacher teams taking on real responsibility for improving teaching and learning
From cumbersome, time-consuming year-end evaluations to streamlined rubric scores
From evaluating individual lesson plans to supervising the effectiveness of curriculum units
From inadvertently sowing envy and division among teachers to empowering and energizing teacher teams and building trust
From focusing mainly on ineffective teachers to improving teaching in every classroom
From supervisors being mired in paperwork to continuously orchestrating schoolwide improvement
The Bigger Picture of School Leadership
Of course, there is more to getting good teaching and learning than supervision, coaching, and evaluation. This diagram, mirroring some of the insights in the poll at the beginning of this chapter, gives us the bigger picture in what’s involved in improving teaching and learning in every classroom.
Yuri Arcurs/Alamy Stock Photo, Image Source/Alamy Stock Photo
Teacher evaluation has been a weak contributor in most schools. The mission of this book is to elevate teacher supervision, coaching, and evaluation to equal partner status, pulling their weight in the overall effort to ensure effective teaching and equitable, high student achievement.
Let's zoom out and get an even broader perspective, looking at one student's journey through a K–12 school district. This diagram shows the approximate proportion of each year that the student spends with each teacher.
For example, Ms. King, the kindergarten teacher, has students most of each day, but once a week students go to specials—Art, Music, Physical Education, Computer, and Library. The middle school this student attends is departmentalized, so students move from teacher to teacher, with one of them serving as homeroom (HR) teacher. The high school is also departmentalized, with one teacher responsible for advisory duties.
Moving through the grades from kindergarten to high-school graduation, this student has sixty-six subject-area teachers—and that doesn't count pullout special education teachers, counselors, tutors, substitutes, and all the other educators and support staff students come in contact with—probably more than one hundred by the time they graduate.
When I show this figure to groups of educators, I ask how many of their teachers they can remember. Usually only a few teachers stand out—a high-school social studies teacher who inspired a lifelong fascination with history, a second-grade teacher who made a biting comment that the student had terrible handwriting and would never amount to anything.
Teachers change lives, often for the better, sometimes for the worse. Every teacher wants to be the one who's remembered thirty years later for their positive contribution. Many won't have that dramatic an impact, but they're all part of the overall K–12 effort to graduate students who are well-educated, decent human beings.
Teachers change lives, often for the better, sometimes for the worse.
The reason I'm including this graphic is to make vivid the importance of all those teachers being effective. It's their cumulative impact, not just a few superstars, that counts. The job of the principal and other supervisors is making sure all students are getting good teaching every day and being vigilant for teaching practices that are not effective or even harmful.
This points to a system of supervision, coaching, and evaluation that has administrators in classrooms frequently, with a good eye for instruction, the human skills to bring out the best in teachers, and the courage to address mediocre and ineffective practices when they occur. The mission of this book is to give you a convincing description of such a system.
Here is a chapter-by-chapter summary.
Chapter One
tells the story of my fifteen-year Boston principalship, during which my colleagues and I struggled against significant obstacles and realized that it's difficult to get major gains in student achievement without external standards linked to good assessments—and a better teacher evaluation process.
Chapter Two
gives the blow-by-blow of my initial failure as a principal to get supervision and evaluation working well, and my discovery, with encouragement from teachers, of mini-observations—an effective way of getting into classrooms and giving teachers feedback.
Chapter Three
analyzes the design flaws in the conventional supervision and evaluation process that explain why it almost never improves teaching and learning.
Chapter Four
describes how mini-observations systematically sample daily classroom reality.
Chapter Five
suggests ways that supervisors can be thoughtful and perceptive observers.
Chapter Six
describes how supervisors can use what they learn in mini-observations to continuously affirm and coach teaching.
Chapter Seven
describes how mini-observations, debriefs, visits to teacher teams, other points of contact, and teacher self-assessments culminate in end-of-the-year rubric evaluations. This chapter includes my revised teacher evaluation rubric.
Chapter Eight
focuses on how student learning can be central to the supervision, coaching, and evaluation process, and several ways to deepen supervisors’ focus on results.
Chapter Nine
further broadens supervision, describing how supervisors can direct and support teacher teams (professional learning communities) as they look at interim assessment results, figure out learning problems, help struggling students, involve students in improving their own performance, and continuously improve instruction.
Chapter Ten
looks at the fraught issue of differentiation and suggests a different set of look-fors in teacher preparation, lesson execution, and follow-up with struggling students.
Chapter Eleven
broadens the usual definition of supervision to include supervisors working with teacher teams as they clarify learning goals and “backwards design” curriculum units—all of which helps teachers draw on each other's insights and wisdom and makes the supervisor a more perceptive and helpful thought partner during and after classroom observations.
Chapter Twelve
asks whether supervisors should get involved in lessons while conducting mini-observations (spoiler alert—there are problems with this practice).
Chapter Thirteen
analyzes supervisors’ time management challenge—how they can fit all this into already-overflowing school days.
Chapter Fourteen
suggests ways superintendents can support and direct the work of supervisors as they implement this model; this chapter includes my revised principal evaluation rubric.
Chapter Fifteen
provides a very short summary of the book, frequently asked questions, and a wrap-up of the basic argument.
Sixteen Enhancements in the Third Edition
This edition is coming out eleven years after the second edition was published and benefits from everything I've learned in the intervening years from coaching principals, speaking and writing about this and other school leadership issues, and extensive reading for my weekly Marshall Memo. I've been surprised at how much my thinking has evolved. Here are some new elements:
This introduction reflects a rethinking of the key issues, including the “four hard truths” about supervision and evaluation and the challenge that supervision and evaluation face if they want to be a player in improving teaching and learning.
There's more emphasis on the issue of equity and the key role that effective, culturally competent teaching plays in closing proficiency gaps.
My analysis of mini-observations has been rethought in a ten-point framework, which provides the organizational structure for
Chapters Four
through
Eight
.
The coaching component of mini-observations is much more prominent throughout the book, playing a major role in continuously improving teaching and learning.
I've clarified that mini-observations are the best observation strategy for principals and other supervisors, while full-lesson visits are appropriate for instructional coaches, peer evaluators, and lesson videos.
The sequence of chapters has been changed, placing rubric evaluation immediately after the implementation of mini-observations to emphasize the close link.
There are three brand-new chapters: making learning central to the supervision and coaching process, a way to rethink differentiation, and whether supervisors should chime in during informal classroom observations.
There's been extensive rewriting and updating and chapters are shorter, which, along with new typography and my attempt to use shorter paragraphs and more bulleted lists, should make the book easier to read.
There are several questions to consider at the end of each chapter.
I've revised my teacher and principal rubrics, taking out the 4-3-2-1 scores at the top of each page, trimming one row on each page, and making numerous wording changes from suggestions made by frontline educators.
Because the rubrics are more compact, the book is smaller and more portable.
I've substituted
supervisor
for
principal
in most sections, emphasizing that the book is also geared to assistant principals, department heads, deans, and central office staff members—anyone who supervises and evaluates teachers.
There are new poll graphs on questions I frequently ask educator audiences.
I've included several new graphics that I hope will shed light on complex issues.
I've made a number of references to the role ChatGPT and other large language models can play in curriculum unit design and lesson preparation.
I've included answers to frequently asked questions in the last chapter to serve as a guide in persuading skeptics of the power of the mini-observations approach.
1A Rookie Principal Learns the Hard Way
We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us. We already know more than we need in order to do this. Whether we do it must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven't so far.
—Ronald Edmonds
I became principal of Boston's Mather Elementary School late in the summer of 1987, absolutely determined to boost student achievement and convinced that supervision and evaluation of teachers was central to my role as an instructional leader. Had I reflected more carefully on my prior experience as a teacher, graduate student, and central office administrator, I would have better anticipated some of the bumps that lay ahead.
Supervision as Seen by a Rookie Teacher
Fresh out of college in 1969, I began teaching at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, an embattled part of the Boston Public Schools. Supremely ill-equipped to handle a self-contained class of twenty-five energetic sixth graders, I had a rough first year. A supervisor from Boston's central office visited several times and was highly critical, so my first exposure to teacher evaluation was one in which my job was on the line.
I was one of a number of rookie teachers at the King, and we all regarded this evaluator with fear and loathing. We groused about how the only things he seemed to care about were quiet students, a clean chalkboard ledge, and window shades pulled down at exactly the same height. Disdain for this vision of good teaching was fiercest among those of us who were having the most trouble with classroom discipline. Imagine our glee when students turned the supervisor's Volkswagen Beetle upside down in the parking lot one spring afternoon.
But the man was right to criticize my teaching, and the point was driven home when I invited an education professor I'd met to observe my teaching. He sat patiently through a couple of lessons and said afterward that he hadn't seen “one iota of learning” take place. This was not exactly what I wanted to hear, but the comment, focused on student outcomes, was right on target—and it's been stuck in my brain ever since.
One of the school's assistant principals was assigned to the sixth-grade corridor, and he knew I was struggling. But with so many other crises in the building, what he gave me was a series of pep talks, not detailed feedback or substantive help.
Somehow I got through the year without being fired—perhaps an acute teacher shortage in Boston helped—and spent the beginning of the summer writing an article vividly describing my experiences (Marshall, 1970, “Law and Order in Grade 6E,” published a little later in the Harvard Bulletin). After it came out, I received perhaps the most devastating evaluation an idealistic young teacher could receive:
Your article clearly shows that whites do NOT belong in Black schools. With all your woes and problems, you forget that the 25 Black students you “taught” have had another year robbed from them (and people wonder why when they become adults they can't “make it” in society). It is unfortunate that you had to “gain your experience” by stealing 25 children's lives for a year. However, Honky—your day will come!
—From one Black who reads the Harvard Bulletin
In my second year, inspired by a visit to a suburban summer school, I implemented “learning stations”—a decentralized style of teaching, with students working on materials I wrote on purple ditto masters the night before. Right away things were calmer and more productive. The principal was quite supportive of my unconventional teaching style, even bringing visitors up to my classroom from time to time. But I rarely got any direct evaluative feedback and was basically trusted and left alone.
Did my students learn a lot? I believed they did, judging from weekly tests I created, but I was never accountable to any external standards. In the 1970s, there was no Massachusetts curriculum to speak of, and measurable student outcomes weren't part of the conversation. For the school's administrators, the important thing was that there were almost no discipline crises or parent complaints emanating from my classroom.
In the 1970s, there was no Massachusetts curriculum to speak of, and measurable student outcomes weren't part of the conversation.
During these years, I operated very much as a loner, closing my classroom door and doing my own thing. At one point I actually cut the wires of the intercom speaker to silence the annoying schoolwide PA announcements. Here was teacher isolation at its most extreme; if World War III had broken out, my students and I might have missed it. I loved this professional autonomy, and my students had some great learning experiences, but how prepared were they when they moved on to seventh grade? That wasn't discussed.
A Quasi-Administrative Role
After eight years teaching sixth graders, I stepped out of my classroom to act as the King School's “education coordinator”—a grant-funded support role that allowed me to work on schoolwide curriculum improvement—and I began to look at grade-to-grade learning expectations. As I moved around the building, I noticed that the curriculum was highly fragmented, with teachers covering a wide variety of material without a coherent sequence from Grade 6 to 7 to 8.
I could also see that the quality of teaching varied widely, with no agreed-upon definition of best practice. But I couldn't get involved in evaluating my colleagues because I was still in the teacher bargaining unit, and even making coaching suggestions was tricky. After two years as education coordinator, I returned to the classroom, believing that I could have more impact teaching one group of students.
But I'd been bitten by the administrative bug, and this was reinforced as I pondered a series of New York Times articles about an intriguing wave of research on schools that somehow managed to get much better student achievement in high-poverty communities. One prominent exponent was Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Ronald Edmonds, who boiled down the formula for effective urban schools to five variables:
Strong instructional leadership
High expectations
A focus on basics
Effective use of assessment data
A safe and humane climate
A 1979 British study, Fifteen Thousand Hours (Rutter et al., Smith, 1979), had a similar message, describing the “ethos” and expectations that made some schools much more effective than others. This vein of research emphasized the importance of the principal going beyond routine administrative work and being an instructional leader. I began to think seriously about becoming a principal.
To make that move I needed an administrative certification, so in 1980, I paid an emotional farewell to the King, where I had spent eleven formative years, and enrolled in Harvard's Graduate School of Education. I had the good fortune to study with Edmonds himself, and his searing comment on failing urban schools, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, became my credo.
I believed I was ready to be a transformational school leader, but during my year in graduate school, the voters of Massachusetts passed a tax-limiting referendum, sending Boston into a budget tailspin and forcing the district to close twenty-seven schools. There was no way I was going to be a principal, and I prepared to return to the classroom.
Then, through a chance connection, I was recruited to serve on the transition team of Boston's incoming superintendent, Robert “Bud” Spillane, a forceful advocate of high student achievement and school accountability. He and I hit it off immediately, and I ended up spending the next six years in the central office, first as a speechwriter, policy adviser, and director of curriculum, then, under Spillane's successor, Laval Wilson, as director of an ambitious strategic planning process. The Nation at Risk report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education dominated the national discourse during this period, and I found myself in the thick of Boston's response to the “rising tide of mediocrity” acerbically described in the report.
My central-office colleagues and I did some useful work—we produced a set of K–12 grade-by-grade learning expectations and curriculum tests—but throughout my six years as a district bureaucrat, I felt that our efforts to improve schools were like pushing a string. There weren't enough like-minded principals at the other end pulling our initiatives into classrooms, and we didn't make much of a dent in Boston's distressingly low student achievement. I was more convinced than ever that the real action was at the school level, and I begged the superintendent to make me a principal.
I was more convinced than ever that the real action was at the school level, and I begged the superintendent to make me a principal.
My Own Ship
In 1987, I finally got my chance. The superintendent put me in charge of the Mather, a six-hundred-student K–5 school with rock-bottom achievement and a veteran staff. As I took the reins, I believed I was ready to turn the school around because I had seen the urban educational challenge from three perspectives: an innovative teacher, a student of the research on effective urban schools, and a big-picture central office leader. Now I could really make a difference for kids.
How did it go? During my fifteen years as Mather principal, the school made significant gains. Our student attendance rose from 89 percent to 95 percent and staff attendance from 92 percent to 98 percent. Reading and math scores went from rock-bottom in citywide standings to about two-thirds of the way up the pack. In 1999, the Mather was recognized in a televised news conference for making the biggest gains in the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, the rigorous statewide tests introduced the year before) among large elementary schools statewide. And in the spring of 2001, an in-depth inspection gave us a solid B+. I was proud of these gains and of dramatic improvements in staff skills and training, student climate, philanthropic support, and the physical plant.
But these accomplishments came in agonizingly slow increments and were accompanied by many false starts, detours, and regressions. Graphs of our students’ test scores did not show the clean, linear progress I had expected. Far too many of our students scored in the lowest level of the 4-3-2-1 MCAS scale, too few were proficient and advanced (the top two levels), and our student suspension rate was way too high. Serious work remained to be done. In 2002, I was exhausted and concluded that I had done as much as I could and it was time to move on. Packing up my office, I hoped that my vigorous young successor would take the school to the next level.
Graphs of our students’ test scores did not show the clean, linear progress I had expected.
Why weren't Mather students doing better? It certainly seemed that we were pushing a lot of research-based buttons, and if the Mather's student achievement had been higher, outside observers would have pointed to a number of “obvious” explanations: the hiring of a number of first-rate teachers, frequent classroom visits, extra funding, major improvements to the building and grounds, the daily Mather Memo communicating operational matters and research insights to all staff, and my seventy-eight-hour work weeks. Why weren't our test scores higher?
Looking back, I can identify a number of factors that made it difficult for me to get traction as an instructional leader: teacher isolation, uneven grade-level teamwork, curriculum fragmentation, poor alignment of teaching and assessment, the difficulty of assessing student writing, and accountability for student learning. Let's examine these challenges—hardly unique to the Mather—and then look at an external event that provided a partial breakthrough.
Teacher Isolation
In my first months as principal, I was struck by how cut off Mather teachers were from each other and from a common schoolwide purpose. I understood teachers’ urge to close their classroom doors and do their own thing—that's the kind of teacher I had been! But the effective schools research and my experience in the central office convinced me that if Mather teachers worked in isolation, there might be pockets of excellence, but grade-to-grade progress would continue to be disappointing.
So I struggled to get the faculty to work as a team. In the Mather Memo and staff meetings, I focused on curriculum and best practices. I encouraged staff members to share their successes, publicly praised good teaching, and successfully advocated for a number of prestigious Boston Public Schools “Golden Apple” awards for the best Mather teachers. I recruited a corporate partner whose generosity made it possible, among other things, to fund occasional staff luncheons and an annual Christmas party. And I orchestrated a major celebration of the school's 350th anniversary in fall 1989 (the Mather is the oldest public elementary school in the nation), fostering real pride within the school and community.
But morale never got out of the subbasement for very long. Staff meetings were often dominated by arguments about discipline problems. As a young principal who was seen as being too “nice” with students, I was often on the defensive. We spent very little time talking about teaching and learning, and most teachers continued to work as private artisans, sometimes with great expertise, sometimes with painful mediocrity—and overall student achievement didn't improve.
Uneven Teacher Teamwork
Lacking the chops to unite the whole staff around a common purpose, I decided that grade-level teams were a more manageable arena in which to build collegiality. I figured out how to schedule common planning periods for each team (by sending the five classes at each grade level to specialist classes at the same periods), and same-grade teachers began to meet at least once a week and occasionally convene for after-school or weekend retreats (for which teachers and paraprofessionals were paid).
Lacking the chops to unite the whole staff around a common purpose, I decided that grade-level teams were a more manageable arena in which to build collegiality.
After much debate, we introduced looping, with all the fourth-grade teachers moving up to fifth grade with the same students and fifth-grade teachers moving back to fourth to start another two-year loop with new groups of students. Teachers found that spending a second year with the same class strengthened relationships with students and parents—and within the grade-level team—and a few years later the kindergarten and first-grade teams decided to begin looping, followed a few years after that by the second- and third-grade teams. That meant students moved through the school in three loops: K–1, 2–3, and 4–5, which had a very positive impact.
But despite the amount of time that teams spent together, there was a strong tendency for the agendas to be dominated by ain't-it-awful stories about troubled students, dealing with discipline and management issues, and planning field trips (we used external funding to pay for a full-time field trip bus, dubbed the Mathermobile). I tried to bring in training and instructional coaches to work with the teams, but I had limited success shifting the agendas of these meetings.
Years later, the idea of grade-level teams working as professional learning communities came into vogue, but this template and the research behind it weren't available to us. Grade-level teams looking at student work and common assessments and sharing techniques happened very rarely. In retrospect, I wish I had attended team meetings and guided them in this direction, but at the time I told myself that teachers needed to be empowered to run their own meetings.
Curriculum Clarity
During my years in Boston's central office, I led a team that spelled out grade-by-grade citywide curriculum objectives. As a principal, I was chagrinned to see these expectations ignored in many classrooms. Mather teachers (like many of their counterparts around the country) often did their own thing, causing lots of problems as students moved from grade to grade. While teachers at one grade emphasized multiculturalism, teachers at the next had students memorize state capitals. While one team focused on grammar and spelling, another cared more about style and voice. While one encouraged students to use calculators, the next wanted students to be proficient at long multiplication and division.
These ragged hand-offs from one grade to the next had a real impact on staff morale. But teachers rarely spoke to colleagues in the grade just below about passing along students with important skills and knowledge. Why didn't they? That would have risked airing serious pedagogical disagreements and jeopardizing one type of staff morale—congeniality. But not having those honest discussions doomed the Mather to a deeper morale problem stemming from suppressed anger at what many teachers saw as students’ uneven preparation for their grade. Morale was further degraded by disappointing standardized test scores, which became increasingly important and public as the years passed.
The lack of clear grade-by-grade curriculum expectations was also a serious impediment to my supervision of teachers. When a principal visits a classroom, one of the most important questions is whether the teacher is on target with the curriculum—but that's hard to define when no one is sure exactly what the curriculum is! If principals don't have a clear sense of what (for example) third graders are supposed to learn about fractions and what proficient fifth-grade writing looks like, it's awfully hard to give effective supervisory feedback. And it's impossible for a principal to address this kind of curriculum anarchy one teacher at a time. Supervision can't be efficient and effective until curriculum expectations are clear and widely accepted within the school.
Supervision can't be efficient and effective until curriculum expectations are clear and widely accepted within the school.
I saw this do-your-own-thing curriculum ethos as a major leadership challenge and tried repeatedly to get teachers to buy into a coherent K–5 sequence with specific objectives for the end of each grade. At an all-day staff retreat in a chilly meeting room at the John F. Kennedy Library overlooking Boston Harbor, I asked teachers at each grade to meet with those at the grade just below and then with those just above and agree on a manageable set of curriculum hand-offs. People listened politely to each other, but back in their classrooms, they made very few changes.
