Metrics for High Quality Teaching

Education has always been considered a black box phenomenon. We all have ideas about the educational outcomes we want, but we are often not very clear about how to accomplish them. One part of our reluctance to penetrate the box is cultural. We would prefer to see education as an art, rather than a science. Another part is complexity. Trying to record everything that happens in a classroom between teachers and students, while accounting for individual, social, and personal factors, seems impossible.

Yet in this era of Standards of Learning, and No Child Left Behind legislation, penetrating the box becomes a matter of necessity. Otherwise, we are spending billions of dollars pursuing educational outcomes without proven, evidence-based methods to attain them.

Education professor Robert Pianta has devoted himself to putting a system in place that will help develop what he calls “the science of teaching in the classroom.” As a first step, Pianta, the Novartis U.S. Foundation Professor of Education and Professor of Psychology, spent the last decade developing and validating the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), which measures the dimensions of teachers’ instructional and social interactions in the classroom that support students’ academic engagement. This metric has been adopted by dozens of educational programs and even some states, where it is being tested as a method of measuring teacher quality. Ultimately, it may be used to test the effectiveness of teacher training, and for credentialing.

Advances in behavioral science provide the underpinnings of metrics like CLASS. “We now have great confidence that we can accurately model interactions between people in complex social settings,” Pianta says. “We have applied that knowledge to teachers and students in classrooms.” With funding from the Office of the Provost, Pianta founded the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) to apply these methods to the interaction between teachers and students. He believes that the University of Virginia is unique in making this connection between advances in behavioral science and preschool, elementary, and secondary education. CASTL intends to mobilize intellectual and scientific resources around Grounds and around the country—in the arts and sciences and in fields like computer science and systems engineering—in this effort to measure the quality of classroom teaching. Pianta’s own research combines his interest in identifying the elements of exceptional teaching with improving teaching practice. Using thousands of hours of live and videotaped observations, Pianta and a team of educational researchers have documented how the quality of teachers’ interactions with students affects the students’ readiness for school. “Curriculum is important,” he comments, “but how it is conveyed is equally critical.”

Pianta has now established a program to apply these insights in the classroom, which he calls My Teaching Partner. Preschool teachers video-record their classes and send the tapes to Pianta’s laboratory, where they are analyzed, edited, and posted on a private web site. Teachers and researchers then meet online every two weeks during the course of a year to discuss their efforts. The results are often surprising. “A lot of terrific teachers aren’t aware of the really good things they do,” Pianta says. “When we point it out, it becomes an insight they can share with others.”

The potential of Pianta’s approach has attracted national attention. The center recently received more than $7 million from two National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research grants—funding that has allowed Pianta and his colleagues to attract more than a score of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, solicit proposals for evidence-based research, and organize a series of conferences. “People lament the poor quality of our schools and link it directly to the quality of our teachers,” Pianta says. “The goal of the center is to take the lead in conducting a rigorous evaluation of how we train teachers—and in the process make our approach to studying teaching, as well as the teacher education program at U.Va., a national model.”