Teacher – Full Teacher Evaluation Information - North Dakota ...

04
Evaluation and Monitoring: Measuring the
Quality of Teacher-Child Interactions
The early childhood research community has taken steps to evaluate and monitor the quality of ECE
programs for decades. Unlike in the K-12 arena, ECE has included observations of classrooms as an
important evaluation component. The focus of these observations, however, has typically been
primarily on environmental aspects of settings. Only recently have states and localities considered
adding measures which focus exclusively on teacher-child interactions to evaluation and monitoring
efforts. In some cases, initial efforts to include such measures relied on non-standardized instruments
because tools were not available to provide reliable and valid assessment of teacher-child, interactionfocused
observations.
The demand for observational tools focusing on teacher-child interactions has increased with the
expansion of ECE quality improvement efforts, most notably Quality Rating and Improvement
Systems (QRIS). Given the Obama administration’s focus on quality improvement and child
outcomes, plus emerging evidence about the importance of effective teacher-child interactions to
children’s development, it is expected that the demand for systematic evaluation and monitoring will
grow in coming years.
The CLASS offers one tool for standardizing the measurement of teacher-child interactions as a part
of evaluation and monitoring systems. Several states and localities, as well as the Office of Head
Start, are using the CLASS in this way. There are many steps, however, between deciding to use the
CLASS and full implementation of an evaluation and monitoring system. In this section we answer
some of the most frequently asked questions about this process. These questions and their answers
come from several years of collaboration with states and localities using the CLASS for this purpose
and rely on the latest research to provide best-practice recommendations. The questions are
organized around the four major steps discussed in the previous section: Planning and Decision
Making, Infrastructure Development, Implementation – Data Collection, and Assessment and
Knowledge Utilization.
CLASS Implementation Guide 29