Inclusive Design: Building Teacher Evaluation Systems That Support Students With Disabilities

Considering the needs of students with disabilities and their teachers is often a challenge in designing comprehensive evaluation systems. In this May 2013 presentation for the Council of Chief State School Officers and Assessing Special Education Students, Lynn Holdheide provides eight recommendations for states when building teacher evaluation systems that support students with disabilities:

• Strengthen existing rubrics by augmenting with explicit examples.
• Leverage the postobservation conference.
• Integrate special education content into evaluation training and incorporate the use of peer evaluators.
• Modify rubrics to reflect the roles and the responsibilities of specialized instructional support personnel.
• Include students with disabilities in growth measures and review data.
• Ensure that multiple and appropriate measures of growth are used. Account for students with disabilities in the student learning objective process.
• Specify that individualized education programs are not measures of growth.