More Than Widgets: TAP: A Systemic Approach to Increased Teaching Effectiveness

This paper outlines how the TAP system effectively addresses the problems that were identified in The New Teacher Project's 2009 report, The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness. More specifically, The Widget Effect made four recommendations to improve teaching effectiveness:
1) differentiate teachers based on effectiveness;
2) identify and train expert evaluators;
3) integrate evaluation with teacher support; and
4) provide options for ineffective teachers.
In this paper, Eckert explains how TAP fulfills each of these recommendations in meaningful, sustainable ways.