MET Project: A Suggestion for Further Research

Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project is an effort sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation aimed at determining ways to measure effective teaching fairly and consistently. The project is collecting oodles of video-taped classroom observations, student surveys, and other data and correlating with student performance data to see if they can identify those behaviors that matter most. MET argues that with multiple measures of effectiveness a better teacher evaluation can be developed. With a better teacher evaluation more meaningful tenure, differentiated pay, strategic placement of teachers, and targeted professional development can result in more effective teachers and higher performing students. MET plans to release a report this year with a composite measure of effectiveness.
I believe MET should continue their research following the release of this report on effective teaching. MET should conduct research on the impact of reflection and feedback using the same infrastructure they already have in place. Currently teachers upload a video of their lesson (they upload four throughout the year) and they send a reflection on that lesson. I encourage MET to design an experiment where one group of teachers received feedback on their lesson from an expert and one group did not. The group selected to receive feedback would be split into two groups: (1) one group that would receive written feedback and also participate video coaching sessions (using video chat) and (2) one group that would receive written feedback alone. Previous research has shown that video/audio feedback works and MET could use the student achievement results to compare the three groups and determine if there is a measurable impact from written feedback and online coaching. Further down the road MET could also analyze the coaching feedback videos and determine what kinds of feedback are effective as well.