 So, as I don't have to tell most of you, teaching has become a red-hot topic. Just two days ago, in his State of the Union address, President Obama singled out teachers pressing for more focus on ensuring that they're rewarded and recognized for their contributions. This will be the year that a large number of states revamp their teacher evaluation systems. That's spurred in part by race to the top, but it's also because of the growing recognition that the status quo isn't working. And in pre-K settings, such as Head Start, some fairly radical reforms are pushing providers to improve the way that adults interact with children. We've got plenty of evidence to show a need for change. Only 71% of high school students graduate on time. Only one-third of fourth graders are reading proficiently. There are pervasive achievement gaps in cities and towns across this country related to income and ethnicity. And when you stack our students' performance against those of other developed countries, we don't exactly stand out. Teaching has a lot to do with this. We've got only 7% of students in elementary school receiving consistently good experiences in their classrooms when you look across the grade's first, third, and fifth grade, according to nationwide research. So finally, the conversation is focused on teaching. As I said, states are revamping teacher evaluation systems. Everyone is grappling with what students' test score data tell us about a teacher, the value-added debates and conversation. Experts are calling for overhaul of teacher preparation programs. And we here at New America have been working on that as well. Our Early Education Initiative put out a paper earlier this year, sorry, in 2011, I guess I should say, several months back, called Getting in Sync. And it was about really overhauling teacher preparation for teachers in the pre-K through third grades. So I urge you to take a look at that. And the Office of Head Start has made funding contingent on the quality of teaching at the program level. And we'll talk a little bit more about that today. And yet, I mean, having this conversation, maybe with the exception of Head Start, objective measurements of teaching and classroom quality are rarely part of larger discussions of public education or teacher effectiveness. This is one of our kind of key points that we're making in the paper. And I hope you all got a copy of it. If you didn't, there are several copies that are on the tables outside. And this is the paper that I'll be taking you through this morning. We, in this paper, are focused on the early years and the early grades. And it's important for us to be focusing on those because there are some real challenges when it comes to looking at teacher effectiveness in these grades. We have a dearth of standardized test data. We have questions about the reliability of one-time snapshots of children's responses to questions or performance in one-on-one games, teacher and student games, et cetera. There's difficulty in assessing the social development of children. And yet, at these young ages, that social development is so important and so connected to their ability to learn cognitive tasks as well. And we have inequitable access to pre-K and full-day kindergarten. So this paper really is trying to kind of take us through what steps need to be taken to change the equation, look at the early grades, but also put in the context of pre-K12 education more generally. We are looking at identifying effective teaching and how to identify what is good teaching, promoting effective teaching, and then finally, rewarding effective teaching. And the observation tools that I want to talk about today are really getting at this first piece that in many cases has not been well-defined in a lot of other debates. It's how do we really identify effective teaching? So to wet our whistle and to really just think about what good teaching looks like, I'm going to take you inside some classrooms. We have some video clips that I'm going to be showing you. And the first one is inside an early learning setting for infants and toddlers. And I'm just going to run this for a couple of minutes just to give you a flavor of what effective teaching, I mean, we don't call it teaching with infants and toddlers, but essentially it's adults interacting with children in a way that helps them learn. And I'm going to show you this clip and this comes from early messages. It's a video program used by the program for infant toddler care in California. So we'll run the clip. Knowing how to modify our communication comes naturally if we attend to the child's cues. When infants look away, become fussy, or don't show any interest in us, we adjust our messages. Here are the various ways to make language understandable for infants. Can she cover the baby? Oh, night, night, baby. Night, night. You ready over there? Okay. Night, night. Night, night. So now let's look at the elementary school years. Here's a clip of what effective interaction looks like in the second grade. And this one doesn't have the voiceover or the text underneath it describing what effective interaction is. But it's essentially a clip that comes from the class video library that's showing a teacher taking a moment not to say correct a student who's wrong, but to help the student come to a correct answer on her own. Let's run the clip. Okay, that's a different, good. So look again. Is there anything that's similar in here? Okay, is that something that's alive, or is that something that's different? It's different. Okay, she gave two things that are different. Can you think of one thing that's alive? Do you have anything in common, anything the same? We are the both grade. Okay, what grade are you in? I'm in grade. Good job. So we have tools actually out there, and many of these are already being used, and some of them are still in development. Some of them are only being used for professional development. Some of them are being used for more informal evaluations. And these tools can really help us get at this question of effective teaching, and they need to be part of the conversation. To use these tools, professionals are trained often over multiple days in what to look for in a teacher and how to accurately code minute by minute what is going on in his or her classroom. The observers are tested to determine if they are reliable. The numbers that they record, the same numbers that trained observers record in similar circumstances. And if they aren't, then those folks are not allowed into the classroom to observe. You essentially want to make sure that the people who are doing the observing are reliable observers. These tools are not about providing checklists with yes or no answers. They're based on scales, say one to seven or one to four, on how well teachers are performing on a variety of tasks, and how well they are responding and interacting with students. This has big implications because you can actually hone in on exactly what a teacher needs to work on. And you can get teachers to talk to each other across grades even, as really needs to be the case in the pre-K third reforms that we talk about here at the New America Foundation a lot. This allows teachers to have discussions across grades about what effective teaching looks like because they're measured using the same tools and they have the same kind of language about what an effective teacher needs to be doing. Here's a chart that shows how many different age ranges these tools cover from infancy through age 18. And I know this is really pretty hard to see. I just wanted to call it out for you. It's on page six of the report. So six months ago, very few people were talking about this, but several new reports and recorded conversations and webinars have burst onto the scene lately. There's a one pager that we put out that I hope you picked up on your way in that describes many of the conversations that have already been happening around this issue. It includes information about this paper that just came out from the Gates Foundation, Gathering Feedback for Teaching. And I should note that we actually, we don't get any funding from Gates, but this report really does help to bring some more depth to this conversation. And Elena Silva has been moderating discussions online around observation of teachers in school districts as well. Technology can be harnessed to make this process more efficient and cost effective. And I really think we need to be thinking about the new technology and new tools to really get our conversation past kind of the tired debates about teacher effectiveness. For example, observations conducted in the Gates Project came from video recordings that captured a 360-degree view of what was going on in the classroom. And the My Teaching program, which we'll hear more about from one of our panelists, involves the use of online tools. There are video libraries, and I'm giving you a clip of just a screenshot here from one of the video libraries that Class puts out that help teachers see what teaching really can look like in a classroom. So let's start talking about a few examples in schools. We're going to start with the youngest years, and I'd like to welcome Susan Oxhorn, or Susan, there you are, to the podium to help us understand why this matters so much in the earliest years. I want to thank Susan for being a co-writer and a wonderful partner on this paper, and I welcome you. Thanks, Susan. And I want to thank Lisa. The feelings are mutual. It's been an extraordinary journey. And also thank Lisa for pushing Early Ed into the conversation and the Early Childhood workforce. As most of you know, the right kind of professional development for those working with our youngest children is the cornerstone of quality improvement. And it's here that the earliest relationships form a sort of a laboratory in which cognitive and social-emotional development are kind of joined at the hip. The agreement of child and the engagement of child and adults actually creates the architecture of the brain, which is, to me, an eternally amazing, amazing fact. And it also builds the children's capacity to learn and develop. So in order to establish this strong foundation for school readiness, for better academic outcomes in the long term and in the short term, it's critically important that teachers and caregivers working with youngest children be active participants in this loop, this feedback loop of observation, of coaching, mentoring, and then observation. And this is a feedback that increasingly they are getting into. We're going to look in the next video. Oh, yeah. Sorry, I can do that. It's just the, yeah. Here we go. In the next video, Amy Dombro, co-author of Powerful Interactions, talks about the promise of coaching. The minute that you pause to observe a teacher, you're kind of quiet down inside and you really are paying attention to what she's doing. It's over time you start getting a sense of what a teacher is doing. I can remember when I was a teacher at the family center and people would come and observe me. People that were only there once or twice, they sometimes had something important to share with me, but they really had very little idea of who I was, who the children were, the kinds of decisions that I was making, the challenges maybe that I was facing that day. So I think to be effective observing needs to take place over time. Yes, we're using video in a professional development model. We're developing around powerful interactions, taking short video clips and then discussing them with individual teachers and with groups of teachers. Always careful to use a term that my colleagues, Judy Javlon and Charlotte Stetson came up with, use I-notice statements so that it doesn't become a judgmental kind of situation, but really a true observation staying objective and looking for strengths of what teachers are doing. Also always kind of keeping open the question of what were you thinking and experiencing? What was a child? What do you think a child was thinking and experiencing? And what you might do either the same or differently next time. If we can think about observing as a strategy to help teachers think about their practice and change practice from the inside out, then we would be making a major contribution to the field. Amen. And I think that Amy Dombro really highlights the promise of professional development and improving practice through the use of observation. However, it's one thing to talk about professional development. It's another to talk about formal evaluations. And they make particularly the workforce in the early childhood world rather nervous. While evaluations at the program level in this birth to three realm are becoming more common, observation-based assessments of individual caregivers and teachers are still rare. Across the country in Hawaii, we have an interesting example of an evaluation based on observation of interactions. It's called Tutu and Me, that's the program. It's an early learning program that was created mostly because Hawaii's children were not ready for school. They had a very low school readiness rate. And Tutu means grandparent in Hawaiian. I'm not sure what dialect, but whatever. And as some of you may know, grandparents are the ones who care for the majority of infants who are in family, friend, and neighbor care. And this constitutes a fairly large percentage of young children in the birth to three realm. So while high stakes evaluations are not an integral part right now of the early learning years, the very earliest years, an evaluation of Tutu and Me provides a very nice template for the quality rating and improvement systems bringing up around the country to assess and improve early learning. The Tutu evaluation used the childcare assessment tool for relatives, CCATR. And you'll see that on page six of the report. It was designed by Bank Street's Institute of the Child Care Continuum and it measures grandparents and parents' interactions with children, mostly ages three and under. The staff members receive training on the CCATR using three videotape observations. And then they designed a study in collaboration with Tony Porter of Bank Street to measure the changes in the quality of caregiver child interactions before and after. So the findings bode well for children's development, I think. The scores increase for engagement. And you can watch those brain synapses sparking. And the ratings also increase for what's called back and forth or bi-directional communication between children and caregivers, which means that adults were talking to children and engaged in activities with them and or holding them, which is very important. And children were more engaged in the materials that sparked their development and learning. So now I'm going to turn the ball back to Lisa for an example from the elementary school years. So thank you, Susan, very much. So I want to tell you about first school. It's one of several examples we give in the report. We also looked at some changes that were happening at the Boston Public Schools. We looked at Chicago at the New Schools Project. There are also several pre-K third demonstration sites in Hawaii and Honolulu. But right now I just want to take you to first school, which is a school-wide professional development program that was developed and is based at FPG in North Carolina. And what they do with this program is come to schools and from all in all pre-K classrooms and all kindergarten classrooms and all first, second, third grade classrooms, they observe what the teachers are doing. And in some cases they're looking at the entire day. They're mapping out time, how time is spent by teachers throughout an entire day. And then they take that data to the teachers and to the principals and talk about what that data means and how they should change what they're doing. They have been using both the class tool and first school snapshot to do this. So I'm going to run a clip here from a teacher who I talked to over Skype. And so that explains the kind of low quality of the video, but I think you'll find it's very high quality of content that this teacher is able to tell us. We'll go ahead and run this clip. They go and compile the data and then they bring it back to you so that you can see what's happening in your actual classroom. And then they don't, you know, I've been in education for a long time and usually a lot of people come in telling you what you did wrong. And these, they took that data and they let you look at it from a different window or a different viewpoint. They showed you what was actually happening in your room and celebrated, you know, lots of great stuff. But then just sort of ask you questions so that you as a professional could make the decisions of, okay, if I know that small group instruction is a great thing for student learning, but yet when I look at my day that I see a huge part of my day is spent in whole group, what could I do as a teacher to make changes in what I do so that my children are spending more time not listening to me but having those conversations with each other so that they're reflecting on their learning, using their vocabulary and just growing. So I think what was great to me is that it was a true picture of what I do. And I think part of what's great about education is that you have to make those intentional choices. Once you know better, you do better as one of my favorite quotes. When you have that data looking in the face, you've got to use it to grow. And then also we spent our time looking at, you also got to see your individual data personally and they gave you the opportunity to look at your data and then they just gave us a sheet and said, what are the things that the data calls to your attention? What does it make you feel for you? And you know, and when you're, for me, I found out that I was a bit of a control freak. My children spent a great deal of time listening to me and so, and I know philosophically that that was not the best for children. So I had to go, okay, why am I, if I know this is what's best? You know, you're doing great things during that whole time, yes, but at the same time I wasn't letting go so my children could blossom and do the things that they needed to do and speak their own words and have their own conversations. So for me, I took that as, okay, I've got to change what my classroom looks like, you know, and what was comfortable for me, get out of my comfort zone and get into the years and how they were going to grow the best. I think in the past our evaluation has just, well, I'll just tell you, I haven't had a single evaluation where, you know, they have the section in there that says strength and then the areas for growth and, you know, I haven't had one since probably early on in my career where I had anything that was areas for growth and, you know, that's a compliment but at the same time inside you're going, that's not right, you know, because we always have areas for growth. And so I think this type of data gives you a huge amount of information for areas for growth. I think it should be a part of our evaluation. I think it's a solid picture of who you are. So at the very end of Andy's comments, you heard her mention and describe the use of observation and performance reviews and that's an area that still needs a lot of discussion and research but it really is bringing us to the burning question of high stakes evaluation. So here's where we are so far. We already are using observation at the program level in birth to five settings. So through the QRIS, the Quality Rating Improvement Systems that are being set up in myriad states now and that are also being fostered by the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge, we're finding more and more programs that are kind of going under the observation watch, so to speak, and are then using those results to try to figure out what they should be doing differently and how to improve. Certainly the new rules in Head Start bring this issue to a crescendo for many of the teachers in Head Start because now under these new re-competition rules that were released in December, Head Start providers will have their grants contingent on how they score in their class observations and how their teachers are really doing in terms of their interaction with students. We have standardized observation results being used in some school districts and the District of Columbia Public Schools is a great example of that. So DCPS has been leading the way with its impact system. And I think Cheryl Olson may be here. I don't know if there she is, yes. So thank you Cheryl for coming. She's already been speaking. So Master Educator with DCPS who understands the early childhood piece of impact and we may have some questions around that later today in our discussion. But what about at the state level? What, if anything, are people talking about when it comes to use of observation in state evaluation systems? And are they really thinking about it in the early grades? Are they really thinking about the pre-K-12 system that is now really becoming the norm in so many school districts? Not saying that observation tools are the silver bullet here by any stretch in the imagination. So I want to just pause with the caution that using these tools we found in a lot of our research that making sure that these kinds of tools are used smartly is critically important and that they are validated. We want to make sure that the tools that are used are able to answer these questions, right? So do students do worse when they're taught by teachers with low observation scores and are students doing better when they're taught by teachers with high observation scores? Kind of seems like an obvious question to be asking, but in many cases we're finding that that may not be asked directly right there front and center in the conversation. We have some of that from the class scores already. There's more research to be done. So I'm just going to quickly take you through our recommendations and then we'll move on to the panel here. And I think that this is what hopefully we'll stir up some more conversation discussion. We found that it's really important to be using the results from valid and reliable observation tools in identification of effective teachers. Tools should be aligned across all years and grade levels. So we talk a lot here about the pre-K third spectrum. There are other areas of transition so that the teachers speak the same language of effective teaching. Professional development and high stakes evaluation should go hand in hand so that teachers' trainings on the one side and their performance evaluations are based on shared definitions of what good teaching looks like. Educators and policy makers should be trained on the significance of these tools. There's a lot of work to do to raise awareness about what these tools are, what they can do, what the validation means, what reliability means. Research and development of new and current observation tools should continue. We need more research. We need to be looking at them in the context of English language learners. We need to be looking at this in the context of special education, in the context of multiple different kind of subject areas that are being taught. So that's it for our presentation. Thank you for listening.