We know that great teaching matters more than anything else within a school. More than class size. More than school funding. More than technology.

Many say "you know it when you see it." But what does great teaching actually look like?

Two-thirds of American teachers feel that current evaluations don't accurately capture the full picture of what they do in the classroom. And without meaningful feedback, improving as a teacher can be like learning to play the piano by yourself or learning to play basketball without a coach: It's very tough to get better and to become great without knowing what you're doing right.

The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project is designed to find out the best way to give teachers the information and support they want. The project has brought together 3,000 teacher volunteers in six different school districts with dozens of education experts and researchers. MET's goal is to find out how evaluation methods can best be used to tell teachers more about the skills that make them most effective and to help districts identify great teaching.

The MET project is already providing practical insights and tools that benefit teachers and students in classrooms today. These insights are being shared widely with the hope that they can offer support for school districts that are creating and designing their own evaluation systems.

Every teacher knows that preparing students for success takes passion, dedication and skill. The MET project's goal is to attempt to break down and measure those qualities so that other teachers can learn from those who do it best.