General Resources

This toolkit from Leading Educators is designed to help state teams focusing on teacher leadership study other states’ approaches, identify strategies they can use, and find resources to support district design and implementation. The toolkit sets out a step-by-step process for making the case for teacher leadership; developing a policy, support, and funding plan for seeding teacher leadership in districts; and monitoring and measuring effectiveness.

This American Educator article discusses successes and challenges of implementing teacher evaluation systems. The report suggests critical components of such systems and lists 10 missteps to avoid in design and implementation. The article suggests improving teacher evaluation in part by including teacher leaders in the process.

This tool from the Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession lets teacher leaders assess their knowledge and skills in working with adult learners, collaborative work, communication, knowledge of content and pedagogy, and systems thinking. 

This brief from TNTP documents the survey responses of 117 high-performing American teachers in high-poverty schools. Some of the findings focus on performance evaluation: teachers support multiple measures to determine effectiveness, particularly academic data, classroom observations, and student surveys; teachers want regular, useful feedback from other outstanding teachers, and opportunities to observe and be observed by other teachers to help them improve.

The American Federation of Teachers and American Institutes for Research reviewed responses from Generation Y teachers (those born between 1977 and 1995) and identified five key needs to transform schools into high-performing workplaces, including regular feedback and meaningful evaluations, collaboration, rewards for high performance, and better use of technology.

This brief by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation highlights nine principles for designing and implementing high-quality teacher feedback and evaluation systems that measure effective teaching, ensure high-quality data, and invest in improvement. The principles, based on findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, include using and weighting multiple measures, ensuring reliability, and prioritizing support and feedback. All principles could be used to develop teacher leader evaluations.

This checklist offers an overview of the three areas that school and districts should address in evaluating teacher-leaders as well as methods for measuring performance in each area. Districts and schools can use this as a guide to consider which methods they would like to use to measure teacher-leader performance in each area. 

In this Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education report, Linda Darling-Hammond says teacher evaluation should be seen as part of a teaching and learning system that supports continuous professional development, and draws a distinction between teacher quality and teaching quality. She provides five key elements for such a system, considers the limitations of value-added analysis, and offers a list of criteria for effective teacher evaluation based on a review of the research on successful approaches to evaluation.