4 Reasons Teacher Evaluation Still Falls Short—and How to Make It Worth the Effort

Teacher evaluation is the process schools and districts use to assess teachers’ instructional practice, provide feedback, and inform professional growth and personnel decisions. It is intended to be a growth-oriented process for developing teacher expertise and improving student outcomes. The goal of teacher evaluation should not be to create better documentation of instruction. It should be to create better instruction.

Teacher evaluation falls short not because educators do not need feedback or accountability, but because many systems disconnect evaluation from its central purpose: building professional expertise. It was never supposed to be simply an annual judgment of a teacher’s performance. Yet too often, the evaluation process becomes something educators endure rather than something that meaningfully improves their practice.

Although teacher evaluation is intended to support professional growth, research suggests that implementation can sometimes prioritize compliance and accurate completion of the evaluation process over using evaluation evidence to improve instruction (Sartain & Morris, 2024). 

In practice, evaluation can become centered on completing observations, entering ratings, meeting deadlines, and fulfilling required processes. When that happens, the evaluation process may feel like an activity to complete rather than an opportunity to improve instruction. Leaders may ask, “How do we get everyone on board with evaluation?” A more productive question is, “How do we help teachers experience success as they improve their practice?”

Sustainable growth occurs when teachers have opportunities to implement instructional practices, receive targeted feedback, reflect on evidence, and try again. This creates a cycle of practice, feedback, reflection, and refinement rather than a single observation followed by a score. Evaluation must be connected to the ongoing supports that help teachers interpret feedback, practice new approaches, and improve instruction (Shyjka, 2022). 

Research and guidance from the Marzano Evaluation Center describe focused feedback and deliberate practice as critical conditions for increasing teacher expertise (Marzano Evaluation Center, n.d.). When teachers can see the connection between focused practice and their own improvement, evaluation becomes more meaningful. They begin to see evaluation not as something being done to them, but as something that helps them become more effective in the classroom. Over time, successful experiences with improvement can build confidence and commitment to continuous growth.

The first step is to shift the focus of classroom observation from compliance to quality. Instead of centering the conversation on, “What rating did I get?” the conversation should move toward, “What aspect of my practice am I intentionally developing, and what student evidence will tell me I am getting better?”

The evidence that matters is not simply whether a teacher performed a particular strategy during an observation. It is whether that practice produced the intended effect for students. Are students more engaged? Are they thinking more deeply? Are they collaborating more effectively? Are they demonstrating greater ownership of their learning? 

Focusing teacher evaluations on growth requires a corresponding shift in how school and district leaders use classroom observations. At the district level, that shift starts with what principals are asked to report and whether feedback quality, not just observation completion, is part of how evaluation is monitored. The focus should be moving from compliance to coaching.  

Principals should not view observations simply as a requirement to complete the minimum number of visits during the year, accompanied by a checklist of basic expectations. Instead, classroom observations should be opportunities to examine the quality and impact of instruction and to provide teachers with specific feedback they can use. In other words, the observation should not end with a rating. The rating should be the beginning of a conversation about growth. 

When teachers can see their own growth, connect that growth to student learning, and understand what to do next, evaluation moves beyond compliance. It becomes a meaningful process for developing expertise, and that is what makes it worth the effort.

Evaluation feedback is most useful when it connects instructional practice to what students are experiencing and learning. Teacher actions are important, but student evidence tells us whether those actions are making a difference. 

Student learning behaviors can offer timely evidence of how students are responding to instructional changes. Teachers can note:

• Are students asking more thoughtful questions? 
• Are they able to explain their thinking? 
• Are more students engaging in productive discussion? 
• Are they applying what they have learned independently? 

These observable changes can give teachers timely information about the impact of an instructional change, often well before the results of an end-of-unit assessment or standardized test are available. 

The focus on student evidence is an important distinction in a meaningful teacher evaluation. A rating by itself cannot close an instructional gap. The focus, therefore, should not be simply on what the teacher did, but on what happened to students as a result.

The goal is not to determine whether a teacher is “good enough.” The goal is to create the conditions for teachers to become increasingly expert at what they do—and to help them recognize whether their instructional decisions are producing the intended results. This shifts the purpose of evaluation, and three practices can help:

Teacher evaluation models must do more than measure instructional performance. They must provide a methodology that supports teacher growth as educators make the instructional shifts necessary to support students in rigorous, standards-based classrooms (Marzano Evaluation Center, n.d.). 

The evaluation process is only as strong as the framework and tools used to carry it out. Effective evaluation systems should provide administrators with a fair and objective way to distinguish among levels of teacher performance using specific, research-based competencies rather than broad or subjective judgments. Systems that recognize the full range of each teacher’s strengths and weaknesses provide a more precise picture of teacher effectiveness (Kraft & Gilmour, 2017). 

Just as importantly, those research-based competencies should reflect the instructional practices and student outcomes that matter most in standards-based classrooms. When the language and processes used for evaluation are disconnected from standards-based instruction, teachers may receive feedback that is technically accurate but not necessarily useful for improving their practice. The result is a system that measures what is easiest to document rather than what is most important to develop.

A central challenge in teacher evaluation is ensuring consistency among evaluators. When administrators interpret and score classroom practice differently, the evaluation process can unintentionally create different expectations for teachers across schools or even within the same school. When evaluators are not calibrated around what effective practice looks like and how evidence should be interpreted, differences in scoring can undermine both the credibility of the evaluation system and its ability to support teacher growth (Hill et al., 2012). 

A district may invest significant time and resources in an evaluation system, only to discover that the implementation is producing inconsistent results. The issue may be that evaluators have not developed a sufficiently common understanding of what to look for, how to interpret evidence, and how to translate that evidence into actionable feedback.

Inter-rater reliability is the degree to which different evaluators reach the same rating when observing the same instruction. Improving inter-rater reliability requires more than training administrators once at the beginning of implementation. Districts need an ongoing approach that builds a shared language, develops evaluator expertise, and provides tools that make accurate implementation manageable. Consistency does not mean every evaluator sees every classroom the same way. It means evaluators share a framework for interpreting evidence, making sound judgments, and helping teachers move forward.

To create greater consistency in instructional expectations, everyone involved in supporting teaching and learning needs a common understanding of what effective instruction looks like and how it contributes to student learning.  When educators are using the same language and examining the same types of evidence, feedback becomes more specific and less dependent on individual preferences or interpretations.

The Marzano Focused Teacher Evaluation Model provides a common language for professional conversations about instruction. Its specific elements, desired effects, and evidence-based approach give teachers, administrators, and instructional coaches a shared framework for discussing practice.

Principals cannot effectively develop teacher expertise without first developing expertise in using the evaluation system themselves. Calibration should be an ongoing process that gives administrators opportunities to examine evidence together, discuss differences in interpretation, practice scoring, and strengthen evaluator judgment. In the same peer-reviewed study referenced earlier, the link between observation scores and student learning gains appeared stronger for principals who had received training and side-by-side coaching (Basileo & Toth, 2019). 

More importantly, calibration is not just about achieving scoring agreement. It is about improving the quality of feedback teachers receive. When administrators become more skilled at interpreting evidence, they are better equipped to help teachers identify meaningful next steps and improve instruction.

The Focused Teacher Evaluation Model supports this through its five-step observation process, providing a common sequence for examining instructional strategies, desired effects, student evidence, teacher adaptation, and scoring. This helps reduce reliance on general impressions and promotes greater consistency (Marzano Evaluation Center, n.d.).

Inter-rater reliability can also be affected by the practical demands placed on administrators. Cumbersome systems for scripting, documenting, and reconciling evidence can make consistent implementation difficult for time-constrained leaders.

Technology should not replace professional judgment, but it can make evaluation more efficient, consistent, and evidence-based. The goal is not simply to make evaluations faster; it is to make the time invested in evaluation more valuable.

iObservation, the Marzano Evaluation Center’s teacher evaluation software, provides a digital environment for documenting observations, tracking teacher growth, organizing evidence, and supporting reflection over time, allowing administrators to spend less time managing evaluation information and more time using it to support teachers.

Ultimately, the strength of an evaluation model lies not in how sophisticated its rubric appears on paper, but in whether it helps educators see instruction more clearly, understand its impact on students, and know what to do next. The goal is not simply to produce a more accurate rating, but to help teachers develop the knowledge, skills, and habits of reflection necessary to become increasingly expert in their practice.

Whatever change your school or district is asking teachers to implement this year, keep returning to one question: Did the process produce evidence that the teacher’s practice improved and that students experienced a better learning outcome?

And perhaps an equally important question for leaders is: How do we create experiences that allow teachers to discover the value of this work for themselves?

If your district is asking these same questions about teacher evaluation, you don’t have to navigate the work alone. The Marzano Evaluation Center helps schools and districts examine their current educator evaluation practices, strengthen evaluator calibration, develop teacher expertise, and build a more meaningful connection between evaluation and student learning. Contact us to talk through your district’s evaluation system.

Martha Hightower, Ed.D.

Dr. Martha Hightower serves as the Product Development Specialist for Marzano Evaluation Center. In addition, she delivers professional development to both teachers and school leaders in various schools to improve planning, instruction, and evaluation.

She has extensive experience in education ranging from special education to general education in primary and secondary schools. She also was a school leader for over ten years in Orlando, Florida where she resides. She received a doctorate degree in Organizational Leadership from Nova Southeastern University.

Dr. Hightower is affiliated with several local non-profit organizations and is committed to leading change and helping others develop systems and plans to sustain better living after trauma.