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Thursday, April 16, 2020

Special Issue: Moving Teacher Evaluation Forward | VAMboozled!

Special Issue: Moving Teacher Evaluation Forward | VAMboozled!

Special Issue: Moving Teacher Evaluation Forward


At the beginning of this week, in the esteemed, online, open-access, and peer-reviewed journal of which I am the Lead Editor — Education Policy Analysis Archives — a special issue on for which I also served as the Guest Editor was published. The special issue is about Policies and Practices of Promise in Teacher Evaluation and, more specifically, about how after the federal passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2016, state leaders have (or have not) changed their teacher evaluation systems, potentially for the better. Changing for the better is defined throughout this special issue as aligning with the theoretical and empirical research currently available in the literature base surrounding contemporary teacher evaluation systems, as well as the theoretical and empirical research that is presented in the ten pieces included in this special issue.
The pieces include: one introduction, a set of two peer-reviewed theoretical commentaries, and seven empirical articles, via which authors present or discuss teacher evaluation policies and practices that may help us move (hopefully, well) beyond high-stakes teacher evaluation systems, especially as solely or primarily based on teachers’ impacts on growing their students’ standardized test scores over time (e.g., via the use of SGMs or VAMs). Below are all of the articles included.
Happy Reading!
  1. Policies and Practices of Promise in Teacher Evaluation: The Introduction to the Special Issue. Authored by Audrey-Amrein-Beardsley (Note: this piece was editorially-reviewed by journal leaders other than myself prior to publication).
  2. Teacher Accountability, Datafication and Evaluation: A Case for Reimagining Schooling. A Commentary Authored by Jessica Holloway.
  3. Excavating Theory in Teacher Evaluation: Implementing Evaluation Frameworks as Wengerian Boundary Objects. A Commentary Authored by CONTINUE READING: Special Issue: Moving Teacher Evaluation Forward | VAMboozled!