Feedback From 360 Degrees

School Administrator, March, 1997 by Richard P. Manatt

Client-Driven Evaluation of School Personnel

Team evaluation, or 360-degree feedback, is so well established in American business and industry that it has become a recurring theme in Dilbert cartoons. Team evaluation means that an employee is evaluated by all who have contact: supervisors, peers, clients, and the public.

This approach is attractive to schools for two reasons. First, student achievement is not improving using a single evaluator. Data never seems adequate to hold anyone accountable. Second, conventional evaluation from the top results in every employee in each job-title group being rated similarly. Stated another way, traditional evaluation of educators lacks the ability to sort. This results in everyone getting high ratings.

The overarching purpose of performance evaluation is to improve performance year after year. It just doesn't happen using the old, almost ceremonial approach.

Some public school districts have taken on this challenge by creating full-blown, 360-degree feedback for educators that is accurate and effective and requires little work on the part of the evaluatee. Done right, 360-degree feedback can be the keystone to school transformation efforts.

A five-year study of 360-degree feedback in the Hot Springs County School District in Thermopolis, Wyo., identified a 15 percent increase in achievement across all subjects measured by the SRA standardized tests. These gains occurred over the period with no decline in morale among teachers and principals due to the ironclad accountability of 360-degree feedback.

Superintendents who have tried 360-degree feedback for their own performance evaluation have found that multiple data sets provide school board members with a more valid and reliable means of judging performance. The typical lament of board members without such information is "how can I rate this behavior when I don't have any information?"

Marred Evaluation

Feedback to teachers is especially important. Despite a decade of feverish activity during the 1980s to evaluate teachers with more precision, principals, working solo, could not do it with any real discrimination. Principals using feedback from parents and students consider it a powerful tool in their evaluations of teacher performance. Dissertations by Peter Price in 1990 and Joan Wilcox in 1995 at Iowa State University demonstrated that student feedback (1) serves as a proxy measure for students' achievement gains and (2) stiffens the principals' resolve to do a more discriminating job of teacher evaluation.

The use of clinical supervision as teacher evaluation, with its implication of remote control of teaching, lost its allure in the 1980s. Teaching is so complex, interactive, and contingent that script tapes and time lines, with constructs developed by scholars, did not result in valid measures of practitioners. Lee Shulman, in his final report for the Carnegie Corporation's Board Certification Project in 1991, concluded that every method one can imagine for teacher performance evaluation is marred in a fundamental way. The solution, he argued, would be a judicious blend of assessment methods.

The School Improvement Model research team at Iowa State University's College of Education reached the same conclusion in the early 1980s. When conducting process/product research for large-scale projects in Minnesota, Iowa, and Texas, researchers clearly noted that most teacher evaluation models ignored the most important question: Do students learn? We concluded that multiple sources of data and different approaches were needed for different classes of employees. We also determined that producing feedback from all directions for teachers provided the same 360-degree feedback for principals and superintendents simply by aggregating the data.

The data sets include feedback from principals, peers, parents, and students, as well as self-reflection and student achievement gains. (See list, page 10.) When providing feedback for principals, building climate and teacher expectations are added to the mix. Principals' feedback sets, in turn, provide feedback for superintendents and their cabinets.

Three Tracks

This new approach to teacher evaluation represents a sharp break with the "treat 'em all alike" custom of the past. The contemporary approach envisions three tracks in which all teachers are evaluated by 360-degree feedback.

* Track 1 is for rookies and consists of basic training with extraordinary resources devoted to working with beginning teachers.

* Track 2 is for a small number of experienced staff members who cannot or will not meet the school's performance standards. These teachers are placed on an assistance track.

* Track 3 contains the majority of teachers under the new scheme. These teachers are encouraged to set and pursue individual and group goals as members of professional development teams. When working in groups, the new model is intended to stimulate professional conversation. First, however, team members need feedback data to discuss. Ron Brandt, in his editor's column, "Coaching and Collegiality," in the March 1996 issue of Educational Leadership, says that for most aspects of performance, helpful feedback is probably essential. Just ask the school's basketball coach and choir director.