Measuring effective teaching
Tom Kane’s 6-year-old son recently offered the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) professor insight into the tricky nuances of assessing complex educational data. The boy’s teaching tool: popular superheroes. He showed me that “if you are going to have a team of superheroes, you don’t want three supermen, you want three people each with different superpowers.” The lesson, Kane said, directly applies to his work aimed at measuring effective teaching. “You shouldn’t be looking for the most super of the supermen, you should be looking for different measures that have different strengths.” The superman metaphor applies to classroom observations, student surveys of teachers, and student achievement on state tests, three measures that are core parts of the “Measures of Effective Teaching” project, an ongoing study aimed at finding out exactly what good teaching looks like. While each measure has its own strengths, none individually can fully predict teacher effectiveness. But combining them,...