This paper purports to offer guidance on how to develop value-added models for students taught by multiple teachers in the same subject — students in team teaching or co-teaching scenarios.
The authors note challenges of assigning accurate value-added scores to individual teachers in a multi-teacher setting.
They examine three models and highlight the strengths of what they call the Full Roster Model.
However, they don’t address the drawbacks inherent in value-added modeling or the lack of meaningful predictive value in terms of value-added’s ability to truly assess a teacher’s impact on student outcomes.
Had they done so, they might not have been so eager to find a method of singling out individual teachers for value-added scores in multi-teacher learning scenarios. It’s just not that important. And it doesn’t reveal that much. But by proposing such a scheme, the authors are tacitly promoting the idea that such methods by utilized.
The practical impact, of course, is not at all considered in the paper. That is, do you really want teachers worrying about their own individual scores in a team teaching environment? Won’t that promote a focus on the individual teacher outperforming his/her colleague rather than on the two working together to collectively improve the understanding of the students in the class? Are students not better served by their teachers working together toward a common end than by two or more teachers competing to outshine one another?
Perhaps a more useful study would have analyzed effective co-teaching strategies in order that practitioners might improve their practice and students might be the ultimate beneficiaries.
But who are we kidding — these papers aren’t written for people who actually teach everyday.
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