Publications

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.

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.  

In this case study, Public Impact profiles a multi-classroom leader in his first year working with math and science teachers in Charlotte, North Carolina. The interview provides a three-dimensional view of the expectations, roles, and challenges of lead teachers.

Public Impact describes the responsibilities of a multi-classroom leader in an Opportunity Culture, and how teachers in this role lead teaching teams to improve student learning. Excellent teachers also can teach on teams, specialize in their best subjects, and use blended-learning models.

This final report by an Iowa Department of Education task force outlines a new teacher compensation system that includes new positions within an overall teacher career ladder: apprentice, career, mentor, and master teachers. 

This sample job description from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction includes typical job responsibilities and hiring criteria for curriculum specialist positions. 

This resource produced by the Boston Plan for Excellence provides sample job descriptions for hiring grade-level chairs for Boston schools.