ABSTRACT
This chapter offers guidance in deciding what should be the major focus of the teacher's job and in designing performance standards that accurately reflect quality teacher work. The foundation for an effective teacher evaluation system—in fact, for any performance evaluation system—is the identification of well-defined job performance standards. The foundation of a unified teacher evaluation system is the use of clearly described and well-documented job performance standards for all educators. Basically, domains are categories of teacher performance standards, and serve as logical clusters for those performance standards. Performance standards are the job responsibilities or duties performed by a teacher. The performance standards—not the domains—form the basis for the development of job descriptions and, thus, should also form the basis for job evaluation. The assumption upon which a system of teacher performance standards is built is that teachers—regardless of what their particular assignments might be—are far more alike than they are different.
