No Teacher Is An Island
This week in The Shanker Blog, authors lan Daly (Professor, University of California San Diego) and Kara Finnigan (Associate Professor, the University of Rochester) published a piece titled: No Teacher Is An Island: The Role Of Social Relations In Teacher Evaluation.
They discuss, as largely based on their research and expertise in social network analyses, the roles of social interactions when examining student outcomes (i.e., student outcomes that are to be directly attributed to teacher effects using value-added models).
They also discuss three major assumptions surrounding the use of value-added measures to assess teacher quality. The first assumption is that growth in student achievement is the result of (really only) interaction(s) among teacher knowledge/training/experience, teachers’ abilities to teach, students’ prior performance levels, and student demographics. Once that assumption is agreed to, the second assumption is that all of these variables can be captured (well), or controlled for (well), using a quantitative or numerical measure. It is then assumed, more generally, that “a teacher’s ability to ‘add-value’ [can be appropriately captured as] a very individualistic undertaking determined almost exclusively by the human capital (i.e., training, knowledge, and skills) of the individual teacher and some basic characteristics of the student.”
As they explain in this piece, these assumptions overlook recent research, as well as reality. They also provide two real-world examples (with graphics to help illustrate how these interactions really look in reality, which I also advise readers to examine here). The first real-world example captures a teacher who “enters a grade level or department in which trust is low and teachers do not share or collaborate around effective practices, No Teacher Is An Island |:
