There is a great deal of talk these days about using a value-added approach to look at students' progress. Instead of just determining whether a student is performing at grade level, why not measure the student against his or her previous performance? Then, in turn, let's evaluate teachers according to whether students have made progress. The thinking is that exceptional teachers are those whose students show the greatest gains.
It's hard to argue against charting student progress, but when it comes to the value-added approach, there does seem to be a lot of arguing going on. In this case, the debate centers on teacher performance and accountability. Should we applaud more for the teacher whose highflying students achieve above grade level, as they did last year and the year before, or for the teacher whose students still aren't at grade level but who made more progress than in previous years? Those are thorny questions that touch on issues related to measurement, the role of teachers, the place of schools, and the nature of the profession. And no, I am not going to try to address those issues here.
What I am going to do is say that we should consider applying something like this value-added approach to teacher growth. Why shouldn't we use information from a teacher's professional history to set goals and create expectations? However good Ms. Pita was last year, don't we want her to be better this year and to improve even more next year?
Before you spill your coffee, note that I am not suggesting that we define a teacher's history by students' test scores alone (although test scores should be part of the formula). When we look at a teacher's history, we need to consider all of the factors that relate to teacher effectiveness.
What about a teacher's ability to create enthusiasm for learning, for example? How about a teacher's commitment to collegiality? And shouldn't we value a teacher's efforts to work with students' parents? Regardless of how good our teachers are in each of these areas, we want them to improve; moreover, theyneed to improve. What was good yesterday will not be adequate tomorrow. Principals need to create situations in which every teacher grows. And how can we determine progress without measurement?
Too often, educators get sidetracked by focusing only on grades, grade-level equivalents, and percentiles. Those are all valid measures, but they're not the only ways to gauge growth. Part of the reason that our society gives so much attention to test scores is that we are so bad at measuring other, more amorphous qualities. That's our fault. If enthusiasm for learning is important—and we know it is—we ought to be able to measure it. How might we do that? Certainly not with a multiple-choice enthusiasm test! Instead, we might examine students' reflections in logs or journals or use rubrics to capture evidence of joyful learning. Or we might even ask students to create a play, song, or piece of art that shows how they feel about learning and school.
We could take a similar approach to measuring growth in faculty collegiality or working with parents. How all of these qualities are measured would vary by school and educational context. Indeed, convening a faculty committee to talk about how "joyful learning," for example, might be assessed and monitored could be a wonderfully rich exercise. It would be great to get student input here, too.
Establishing measures for these kinds of variables would enable educators to set meaningful professional goals and work toward improvement. At my school, for example, teachers set individual goals that focus on incorporating multiple intelligences in their pedagogy and assessment. In addition, teacher teams set goals for using new technology in their instruction. Invariably, progress on these kinds of goals isn't as easily measured as average attendance, days lost to suspension, or how many books have been read (and to be fair, each of these indicators is also important). But we cannot let the difficulty prevent us from setting meaningful goals and trying to capture growth.
When I think about value-added assessment, I think that everyone in my school should be performing better this year than in the past. Sure, I want students to be reading and calculating better, but I also want teachers to be making instruction more engaging and classrooms more exciting. I want faculty committees biting off tough tasks and pushing themselves to figure out better solutions. And it doesn't stop at my door. I want to do a better job of listening and supporting. I want my students and my teachers to be eager to come to school every day because they know that learning is exciting and that they are going to learn more. I want to know how good we are today so that in the future I can look back and see how we have improved. That's the value that I want to add.
