December 2007
The 2007 ETS Invitational Conference
This year, more than 200 researchers, policymakers and leaders of professional organizations attended the 2007 ETS Invitational Conference in San Francisco to examine some of the most critical issues surrounding the assessment of teacher quality.
Highlights of the conference included:
- An opening session, moderated by Ida Lawrence, Senior Vice President of Research and Development at ETS, that focused on measurement issues associated with entry into the teaching profession.
- Suzanne Wilson, Director of the Center for the Scholarship of Teaching and Professor of Teacher Education, Michigan State University, noted that existing measures are an "incoherent patchwork" that have no clear beginning or end. She called for a consensus framework that integrates a coherent picture of teacher candidates.
- Tim Daly, President of The New Teacher Project, discussed his organization's successful experience in placing alternate-route teachers in high-needs schools and districts across the country and highlighted the importance of adequate assessment of performance throughout the first years of employment, prior to the awarding of tenure.
- Alan Bersin, former Secretary of Education in California, discussed the integrated assessment and support structure developed for teacher education in his state, including measures of content and performance assessments conducted during mentored induction periods.
- A second session, moderated by Steve Lazer, ETS Vice President, Assessment Development, focused on measuring teacher quality in practice.
- Deborah Ball, Dean, School of Education and William H. Payne, Collegiate Professor, University of Michigan, reviewed the landscape of assessing teaching, and highlighting the work that she and colleagues have done in examining the nature of content knowledge that is needed for effective teaching of mathematics.
- Doug Harris, Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, discussed value-added methods for evaluating teacher quality, as well as some of the methodological and conceptual challenges to their successful implementation.
- Susan Zelman, Commissioner of Education in Ohio, described the comprehensive teacher assessment system developed for the state, including the Praxis I®, II® and III® assessments.
- Panelists Pamela Grossman, Professor of Education at Stanford University and Susanna Loeb, Stanford University Professor highlighted their work with tracking teachers in New York City who are being recruited and prepared through different pathways.
- The final session, moderated by Drew Gitomer, ETS Distinguished Researcher, Policy Evaluation Research Center, focused on an often neglected issue — that teacher quality is not simply something that can be defined as an individual trait, but is the result of complex interactions between teachers, students and school contexts.
- Arturo Pacheco, Professor and Director of the Center for Research on Educational Reform, University of Texas at El Paso, spoke about how knowledge, skills and dispositions all contribute to the relative success of instructional interactions.
- Mary Kay Stein and Lindsay Clare Matsumura, University of Pittsburgh researchers, raised concerns about the current conceptualizations of student growth based on standardized test scores and called for more sustained measures of student growth directly connected to classroom practice.
- Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kellner Family Chair in Urban Education and Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, closed the session by raising the challenging idea of "opportunity to teach." She argued that the ability to demonstrate the quality of teaching is highly dependent on the kinds of conditions that exist in a school that differentially support good teaching and urged an expansive view of educational equity from both student and teacher perspectives.
- Panelists joining the speakers were Lloyd Bond, Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation; Carol Dwyer, ETS Distinguished Presidential Appointee; Kenji Hakuta, Professor of Education at Stanford University; and Joan Baratz-Snowden, President of the Education Study Center. This discussion centered on the vast amount of knowledge and experience in assessing teaching that the field can build on, especially from the contributions in creating assessments for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS).
- Closing remarks were given by Lee Shulman, President of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Shulman criticized some widespread current practices as being impoverished measures of teacher quality and urged that any model be guided by fundamental understandings of the nature of good teaching practice. He praised the longstanding contributions of many of the conference speakers, as well as ETS as an organization, for having developed the robust, contextually rich assessments of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. He noted that the NBPTS assessments are "the closest we've ever come to effective assessment of teacher quality."
Over the past day and a half," Shulman said, "we have learned from the insights of our speakers a multi-faceted, rich sense of what it takes to assess teacher quality. The message is clear — we need not just develop a good assessment 'of' teacher quality, but rather, create an assessment 'for' teacher quality."