You may remember this paper – Do We Know a Successful Teacher When We See One? – which answered, pretty firmly, ‘No’.
The same team have now set out to see if they can solve the problem they set out in the previous paper.
Existing observation rubrics are designed around a view of what great teaching is. This team instead tried to create something which was quicker, simpler and more predictive.
And they succeeded in developing an instrument which is more predictive than other measures and quicker to use, with six categories, rated as present, absent or in between…
In doing so, they took a particularly impressive approach to falsifying their work.