Principal Observation of Practice and Stakeholder Perception: A Correlative Study of Alignment and Their Relationship to Teacher Effectiveness as Measured by the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System

This study was focused on the strength of legacy Memphis City School’s model for measuring effective teaching, known as the Teacher Effectiveness Measure. The Teacher Effectiveness Measure was comprised of five measurable components and weighted accordingly: Teacher observation, 40%; teacher content knowledge, 5%; stakeholder perception, 5%; student achievement, 15%; and student growth, 35%. The purpose of this correlational study was two-fold. First, the researcher wanted to determine whether the Principal’s Observation of Practice and the Stakeholder Perception Survey measurements aligned. Secondly, the researcher wanted to understand the relationship, if any, between TVAAS and these two observation measures. For each of the 1,783 teachers in tested areas, data were collected and analyzed based on Principal Observations of Practice against a common rubric, Stakeholder Perception surveys, the Tripod Student Perception Survey aimed at assessing a student’s classroom experiences with a specific teacher, and a value-added measurement, TVAAS, designed to illustrate the impact a teacher has on a student’s academic growth. The results of this study suggested that the way in which principals rate teacher effectiveness and the way in which stakeholders, in this case students, rate teacher effectiveness were not the same. The results suggested that the ratings principals and students gave a teacher were only occasionally supported by equivalent academic growth results as measured by TVAAS. Finally, the results of this study suggested that while Principal Observation of Practice resulted in weak TVAAS predictive power, the addition of Stakeholder Perception did not increase TVAAS predictive power in a meaningful way