21st Century Learning and Teaching

We know that great teaching matters more than anything else within a school. More than class size. More than school funding.

More than technology.

Many say "you know it when you see it." But what does great teaching actually look like?

Two-thirds of American teachers feel that current evaluations don't accurately capture the full picture of what they do in the classroom. They want information that they can trust from measures that are fair and reliable.

Because without information that leads to meaningful feedback, improving as a teacher can be like learning to play the piano by yourself or learning to play basketball without a coach: It's very tough to get better and to become great without knowing what you're doing right.

The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project was designed to help teachers and school systems close the gap between their expectations for effective teaching and what is actually happening in classrooms.

The project brought together 3,000 teacher volunteers in six different school districts with dozens of education experts and researchers.

The MET project's goal was to build and test measures of effective teaching to find out how evaluation methods could best be used to tell teachers more about the skills that make them most effective and to help districts identify and develop great teaching.