Typically, an educator effectiveness program describes a cycle of observations and assessments that apply to different groups of teachers during an academic year.
Educator effectiveness is a method used in the K-12 school system that uses multiple measures of assessments including classroom observations, student work samples, assessment scores and teacher artifacts, to determine the impact a particular teacher has on student's learning outcomes.
Today, federal and state policies have encouraged school systems to design more comprehensive evaluation systems that rely on multiple measures of how a teacher performs by looking at items such as student performance gains, classroom observations, teacher reflections, content specific knowledge and student reflections.
Quality teaching also has been identified as a key influence for positive learning outcomes for the diverse body of students in the classroom.
Some countries such as Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden provide annual feedback on teaching practices.
Other countries, such as Norway and Iceland, leave the decision about how the teacher evaluations systems will be done to be determined at a local level.
Singapore is another country that does not use test scores but rather focuses on how teachers work together as a main part of their evaluation system.
Singapore also focuses heavily on professional development around evaluation, coaching, mentoring and collaborating with other educators with an overall goal of getting a high-quality teaching staff.
Some schools rewards teachers by paying them more based upon their student's test scores, which is linked to the Race to the Top funding in the United States.
In Finland and Canada, they do not to use merit-pay approaches but encourage conversations between the evaluator and teacher about student progress and success.
The biggest component of the outcome data is growth of student learning as measured by standardized tests.
Most educator effectiveness programs rely on some form of value-added measures to determine student growth.
In order to effectively implement an educator effectiveness system, some argue that states need to create different evaluation systems for the teachers who teach students in non-tested areas such as submitted portfolios of student work, lesson logs, video clips of them teaching and reflective commentaries on lessons.