Chapter 2: Beyond Measurement: Context, Caution, and the Integrity of Teachers' Work

Any educator who has painstakingly planned a lesson, only to have it thrive one period but flop the next, will likely resonate with Peter Hlebowitsh's compelling essay. Policymakers and politicians who have not set foot in a classroom since their student days, however, would likely scan Hlebowitsh's first sentence, feel confident that their policies have been confirmed, and read no further. If they were to read on, they would find that Hlebowitsh problematizes current efforts to over-quantify student assessment and teacher evaluation by arguing that value-added, best practice, and competency-based approaches to defining teacher effectiveness are flawed by the sheer fact that they fail to acknowledge what he refers to as “the ontological side of teaching—the actual experience had in the classroom” (p. 1); that is, the reality that classroom experiences are always situational and often unique. This being the case, Hlebowitsh concludes with a plea for recognizing the need for discretionary space in teachers' classroom work, and further suggests that any construct of teacher effectiveness should be fashioned with respect to both a product feature—outcome expectations the teacher strives to meet—and a process feature—the classroom experiences the teacher orchestrates.