A recent report by the Center for Teaching Quality explores the complex issue of measuring teacher effectiveness. In Teacher Effectiveness: The Conditions That Matter Most and a Look to the Future (download the PDF here), Barnett Berry (along with Alesha Daughtrey and Alan Weider), explores the factors that contribute to teacher effectiveness, how to improve teacher effectiveness, and the policy and system implications of research related to teacher effectiveness.

Berry urges those undertaking efforts to measure teacher effectiveness to resist the seductiveness of using standardized test results as the single measure, and reach beyond what an individual teacher does in his or her classroom. Research, he indicates, demonstrates that numerous factors influence teachers' effectiveness, including school leadership, peer effectiveness, opportunities for collaboration and professional development, student factors, teacher preparation, and teaching assignments. The challenge of providing effective teaching in every school, report the authors, is less about problems with individual teachers and more about the problems with the systems in which teachers are embedded.

CTQ's own research points to working conditions in schools as significantly influential factors in teacher effectiveness. Efforts to improve teaching effectiveness are strongest when they blend policies and system supports that address the conditions that facilitate improved teaching effectiveness. Others factors include teacher preparation, creating collective responsibility, building vertical and horizontal collaboration, ensuring teaching assignments aligned with area of preparation, managing student transiency, and supporting students in and out of school.

Federal, state, and local policymakers have a role in shaping the conditions that support teacher effectiveness. They can ensure effective preparation programs that provide year-long paid internships and include specialized preparation, mentoring and school-based support from leaders prepared to support teacher effectiveness, extensive collaboration with peers for improving teaching and student learning, and ongoing professional learning for continuous improvement.

NSDC's definition of professional development, when implemented fully, creates not only the conditions the Center for Teaching Quality recommends for teaching effectiveness, but increases the likelihood that those conditions translate effective teaching into student results.

Joellen Killion is NSDC's deputy executive director.