Gates Goes to the Tape for Teacher Evaluations

Last week's big news came from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is investing $335 million to overhaul the personnel departments of several big school systems. A large portion of the foundation's investment will finance research by dozens of social scientists and thousands of teachers to develop a better system for evaluating classroom instruction.

Educators and researchers will analyze thousands of hours of videotaped lessons to identify attributes of good teaching and possible correlations between certain teaching practices and high student achievement, as measured by value-added scores, the New York Times reports. The effort aims not just to evaluate teachers on multiple measures of effectiveness (the NYT article lists value-added measures as a starting point), but also to help teachers improve by learning from talented colleagues.

Gates's research could also lead to wider use of video observations of teachers—a potential boon to time-strapped administrators who are now required to observe teachers several times throughout the year. However, it's also problematic to judge teachers remotely through a single lens (literally).

Would you participate in video observations? Under what circumstances? Do you see the potential to learn from peers' taped lessons? What's gained or lost in the shift from analog to digital methods?