Supporting Effective Teaching in Tennessee:
Listening and Gathering Feedback on Tennessee’s Teacher Evaluations
Recommendation 3
Address challenges with the current quantitative and qualitative measures of teacher effectiveness.
Many of the issues that have arisen are not due to problems with the First to the Top plan for teacher evaluation,
but rather from the remaining gaps in the development and implementation of the multiple measures that form
the backbone of the evaluation system. We recommend these gaps in the quantitative measure, and some
missing elements in the qualitative measure, be addressed as soon as possible. For example, we recommend the
state offer teachers in non-tested grades and subjects (who do not yet have individual student growth, or valueadded, data) the option of temporarily increasing the weighting of the qualitative portion of the evaluation.
Recommendation 4
Support school and district leaders in becoming strong instructional leaders capable of assessing and
developing effective teaching – and hold them accountable for doing so. The initial work of implementation
has focused on evaluating and developing the performance of teachers. For the full impact of this work to be
sustained, it must be combined with a similar effort for school and district leaders.
Recommendation 5
Re-engage educators in those districts where implementation of the teacher evaluation syst