The Best Foot Forward Project is featured in this HGSE Usable Knowledge blog post.
When your supervisor points out a flaw in the way you do your job, you probably try hard to receive the criticism constructively and use it as a prompt to do better. But despite your admirable maturity, you’re human, and you may also feel defensive, or resentful, depending on your relationship with your boss. Or you may just feel confused — what she flagged may have gone unnoticed by you, or may not feel like a relevant indicator of your abilities.
All performance reviews are vulnerable to this kind of disconnect, but when it comes to classroom observations as a measure of teacher effectiveness, the stakes can feel particularly high. Classroom observations are not new, but they have been largely perfunctory in recent years, with more than 98 percent of teachers receiving the same “satisfactory” rating. A number of states are trying to restore integrity to the evaluation process (for instance, training and certifying supervisors on a formal rubric and encouraging supervisors to differentiate more meaningfully). But implementation has been uneven for a number of reasons, including inadequate training of supervisors, supervisors who lack content knowledge outside of their own subject, and the difficulty of finding time to do all the required observations.
Is there a better way? Researchers at the Best Foot Forward project at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University are testing the hypothesis that there is. In a controlled study now in its third year, they are looking at the effects of a new evaluation system that gives video cameras to teachers and allows them to record the lessons they choose. The teachers then view the recorded sessions and select the videos they want to submit for observation. Before submitting, they can even share the videos with peers to get feedback, possibly choosing to rerecord certain lessons for formal review.
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