Year-long Study Serves as Blue-print for Creating Outstanding Educators
October 23, 2002
Press Release
CHATTANOOGA, TN - Throughout the 2001-2002 school year, Chattanooga’s Public Education Foundation (PEF) documented and analyzed the skills, experiences and beliefs of 92 outstanding elementary and middle school teachers in Hamilton County’s public schools to determine what constitutes a “Highly Effective Teacher.”
“The response was overwhelming, and every school had teachers that met our research criteria,” said Dan Challener, PEF president. “What we wanted to determine from our research is just what makes them perform at such a high level, and then try to capture those methods so that other educators may shape their approaches with solid examples.”
Studying teachers from 40 different Hamilton County elementary and middle schools, the Foundation’s three-strand research used interviews, surveys, classroom observations, and personality inventories to identify the strengths, beliefs and talents of highly effective teachers. The PEF also analyzed the post-secondary experiences of these teachers to understand which were most valuable, and recorded video footage of their classroom techniques, garnering the necessary material to create training packages for new teachers, principals and school officials.
The 92 highly effective teachers were chosen based on their Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) scores. Developed to provide information on how schools are performing in helping students make academic gains, TVAAS analyzes the scores students make over a three-year period on assessment tests, and in turn, provides teachers with their gains.
Teachers who scored in the highest quartile of the Hamilton County TVAAS gains were invited to participate in the research; each elementary and middle school in the district had at least one teacher represented in this percentage. Principals from every school were asked to give letters of invitation to two additional teachers whom they knew to be highly effective educators.
“The goal of PEF is to help our community recruit, train and retain high quality teachers for all our students,” said Challener. “Conducting the Highly Effective Teacher Research has opened new doors and given us direction on where to take our next step toward achieving this goal.”