The Best Foot Forward Project is featured in the following article on Impatient Optimists, a site featuring grantees of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
It’s not surprising that when it comes to evaluation, teachers would prefer submitting videotapes of their best lessons rather than having their principals drop in, conspicuously, on their class. But it turns out that many principals prefer it too.
Last year, four teachers at Young Oak Kim Academy, a Los Angeles middle school, participated in the Best Foot Forward Project. The new national initiative, which in its first year included 350 teachers and 101 administrators at 85 schools, allows teachers to choose videos of their best lessons for evaluation. Directed by the Center for Education Policy at Harvard University, the project aims to determine if such an approach can improve the teacher evaluation process.
Andrew Conroy, the assistant principal at Young Oak Kim, is convinced it does. He calls the video evaluation process a “one-hundred percent” success—and “a night and day difference from how we traditionally observe teachers.”
First of all, it eliminates the “gotcha” moment teachers, and even students, experience when he walks into a classroom. “I try to be discreet, but it’s impossible, really,” Conroy says. “The kids look up at me, and the teacher’s blood pressure rises. But with video, the kids are being real, how they actually are.”
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