Are more than numbers needed? The Ethics of Collaborative Teacher Evaluations

Abstract Information: Teachers have a moral and ethical duty to help the next generation of society grow in knowledge and technical and social skills. Additionally, there is a duty placed upon administrators and policymakers who evaluate teachers directly or indirectly. The motivation for establishing morals and ethically correct behavior is to increase the well-being of individuals and society. This may be accomplished by having a constructive teacher evaluation system that motivates teachers, which can increase student growth and achievement. The specific focus of this roundtable is to promote thoughts on how the well-being of teachers and, subsequently, students may be improved through ethically sound performance evaluations. Using teacher evaluations that include suspect metrics is immoral (not promoting well-being) and needs to be revisited. Ethical codes need to be constructed to best represent the moral values that promote continuous improvement of pedagogy. Many teacher evaluations incorporate quantitative data that include student growth data or data from high-stakes tests. Many of these metrics used are of questionable validity, reliability, and fairness. Although being de-emphasized in recent years, Value-added Models (VAM) scores have been a big part of teacher evaluations. This resulted in teachers’ decline in motivation and morale. For the state of Florida, quantitative student performance data composes 30% of the teacher evaluation score, and in some instances, an arbitrary goal is set without regard to student contexts or comparable measures with other teachers within the school or district. By using an evaluation framework like the Model for Collaborative Evaluations (MCE), a teacher evaluation system may be developed that follows collaboration guiding principles developed in the MCE and standards for evaluators established by well-respected professional organizations such as the American Evaluation Association, the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education. The latter three organizations developed the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, the generally accepted work that emphasizes validity, reliability, and fairness. The MCE approach is designed to help teacher evaluations be as valid, reliable, fair, realistic, and efficient as possible. The “Follow Specific Guidelines” component of the model creates the moral and ethical foundation from which evaluations may be conducted. A better approach to teacher evaluations would be one that focuses on teacher best practices, which can include using student data to drive teacher pedagogy but omitting it as a metric to judge teacher quality of teaching. Using an evaluation framework like the MCE and its collaborative approach can allow teachers to be fairly judged as to their teaching performance. It can drive continuous improvement of teaching craft and may increase teacher morale and motivation because they have significant input as to what should be used to measure teacher performance.