Abstract

It has long been acknowledged that outside of the family, teachers have the greatest influence on student success. Teaching is one of the most closely scrutinized professions in existence and it is one in which educators are evaluated for someone else’s performance in addition to their own. Teacher evaluations are a vital component of a continuous improvement process that can, if administered correctly, help with the ultimate goal of getting students to be successful. Yet, measuring teacher quality is a challenging task because of the complexity of the educational system. We present the Model for Collaborative Evaluations as a strategy to frame the evaluation process, which offers a consistent and efficient system to formatively and summatively evaluate teachers in a sound manner. A goal of this paper is to provide a cross-pollination of ideas from the evaluation and educational fields by laying out formal processes that could be used in collaborative teacher evaluations. The interdisciplinary approach proposed in this paper makes a sound structure that may improve teaching and, ultimately, student development.