How Prepared Are Principals to Evaluate Teachers? A Look at Principals’ Professional Development and High Stakes Educator Evaluation

Lackey, Angie Katherine. How Prepared Are Principals to Evaluate Teachers? A Look at Principals’ Professional Development and High Stakes Educator Evaluation. Published Doctor of Education dissertation, University of Northern Colorado, 2020. A primary goal of Race to the Top was to increase states’ capacities to help school districts have a common means of evaluating teachers and school principals. With funding, states developed a rubric that could be used by districts to evaluate and improve teacher practice. As a result of this change to state systems, research has also begun to focus on the knowledge and practice of school principals who use state evaluation systems that were created. This study examined the professional development experiences of school principals in three school districts across a central region in the state of Colorado for the purpose of determining if variation existed in how principals were trained to use the current state evaluation system. One district employed a trained trainer who had completed a program that enabled them to teach evaluators to use the Colorado State Model Evaluation System but the other two districts did not have a person with the same training. Through the use of a qualitative study design, 19 school principals were interviewed and an analysis of the principals’ experiences was completed. Evidence from the research suggested those principals who evaluated in the district with the trained trainer had stronger professional development on how to evaluate than the principals without a person with the evaluative training experience. Implications for future research included a need for further understanding of how district level personnel are trained to guide their school leadership to evaluate. An additional need was also generated to understand how school principals interpreted the standards within the evaluation rubric and how closely those interpretations aligned to one another within and across school districts.