Best practices in education

During graduate school, I figured the easiest way to tell if a teaching method was effective would be to use students as their own benchmark. I proposed collecting per-student changes periodically over time to evaluate a new teaching method. That way I could control for background and socio-economic factors that I didn’t have the time or facilities to deal with [link] . Per-student changes were averaged and the net change was used to see if a one teaching method was better or worse than another.

This is the basis for the ‘value-added’ method that’s currently being proposed for the LA Unified School district to evaluate the performance of teachers. Students act as their own benchmark. Prior year performance is compared with current year. Because it measures students against their own track record, it largely controls for influences outside the classroom. The aggregate net-change from one year to the next is telling. It may not be perfect, but it is the most representative and least contaminated method we have for identifying the most effective teaching practices in a heterogeneous school district [link].