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Comment by jim-greer | Hacker News Reader

What do you think is the best way to evaluate teachers, if any?

I teach at the high school level. I don’t think we have figured it out yet; however, my personal belief is that it would require the crevasse between the high-volume/low-stakes instruction-focused assessment (which cannot be “trusted“ generally) with standardized assessment (which can be “trusted”)to be bridged in such a manner that the daily assessment that takes place all across the country, every single day, can be viewed as legitimate measures of student capability. Without being able to accurately measure student ability day to day, we will not be able to measure teacher effectiveness.

I would love to see a toolset like this come into being, but I have no ability to develop such tools.

Would you think measuring general alertness / focus would be a close proxy (or accurate derivative depending on how you frame it) to what you propose?

Alertness/focus isn't necessarily a good measure either, as it's heavily influenced by genetics, hormones and diet which the teacher doesn't control.

The school can try to influence the diet and exercise at the very least, even if not every teacher can.

While I think attention/engagement would be a useful data point during instruction - no, I don’t think it’s adequate.

To give a little more, attentiveness data would only tell me the student is, for instance, reading a text passage. It offers no insight into how they read the text or to what degree they are applying any instructional concepts to the text. This is useful for instructional purposes (if delivered to the teacher in such a way that they can quickly scan the room and grok what’s happening - but that’s getting into AR territory), but it doesn’t do much for the larger goal.

Assessment can give me that kind of information; hence, my belief that making instruction-based assessment more globally trustable is the key component.

Again, I would love to see something like this come to be. I’d love to jump ship and work on it full time. It would not only provide significant academic advantages, but also make increased teacher compensation politically palatable. If we can measure teacher effectiveness, then we can reward it. If we can’t, we use tenure.

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