Preschool teacher evaluation form: what to observe and score

Build the form out of domains you can see, not qualities you can feel.

Five cover a lead preschool teacher's job: teacher-child interactions (how the teacher greets, questions, listens and guides), the classroom environment (materials, layout, and whether the room works for the day's plan), planning and instruction (what was planned, what actually happened, and what children were learning), family communication (daily exchanges and the harder conversations), and professionalism (reliability, teamwork, records, and how feedback is received).

Everything else on the form is detail inside one of those five.

If you want an established structure for the interactions half, borrow from Head Start: federal monitoring scores classrooms with CLASS, and the three CLASS Pre-K domains used in Head Start monitoring are Emotional Support, Classroom Organization and Instructional Support (45 CFR 1304.11).

ACF scores a grantee by observing a random sample of its classes and averaging the domain scores across them (45 CFR 1304.16).

CLASS is the instrument Head Start's federal monitoring uses to score classroom interactions, so the requirement lands on Head Start grantees rather than on private centers — but the shape travels, because interactions are where a preschool teacher's skill shows first.

Keep every line about the work.

EEOC-enforced laws bar employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation and transgender status), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information, and bar retaliation.

On a form, that means rating what a visitor standing at the back of the room could watch — a greeting, a question, a transition handled well — rather than personality, background or personal circumstances.

Anchor the items in the job, too: the criteria you score should match the duties in your preschool teacher job description, so a teacher is evaluated against the role they were actually hired for, not against an idealized list nobody was hired to do.

This sample is built to be copied into a document or spreadsheet: a header block, a rating key, five scored domains, comments, and signatures.

Adapt the items to your curriculum and age group — a toddler room gives you different moments to score than a pre-K class — and hand every new teacher a blank copy during their first week, so nobody meets the criteria for the first time inside an evaluation.

Rate every item with the same word labels: Needs support (not yet part of the teacher's practice), Developing (appears inconsistently), Meets expectations (consistent and independent), Strength (consistent, and worth having peers watch).

Centers that score electronically can hang numbers on the labels — the labels matter more than the digits, because they describe behavior a bare number never does.

Form part	What it covers
Teacher and observation details	Teacher's name, classroom and age group, observer, date, and the arrival and departure times of the observation
Rating key	The four labels above, defined once at the top so both parties score from the same definitions
Teacher-child interactions	Greetings at arrival; getting down to the child's level; open-ended questions; responding to a child's idea; guiding a conflict instead of only stopping it; feedback that names what the child did
Classroom environment	Centers and materials ready before children arrive; the room laid out for the day's plan; materials within children's reach; walls that show the children's own work; wait time handled without dead time
Planning and instruction	The written plan matches what actually happens; learning goals visible inside the activities; group time holds the group; vocabulary and concept-building present; the teacher adjusts when an activity flops
Family communication	Daily exchanges at drop-off and pickup; conversations documented; newsletters or app updates sent; a hard conversation handled privately and professionally
Professionalism	On time and reliably present; follows center policies; works respectfully with co-teachers; keeps required records current; receives feedback without defensiveness
Comments and strengths	What the observer saw, in the order it happened — with at least one strength named specifically
Growth goals	The section both parties fill in together — see the growth-plan section below
Signatures	Teacher and observer sign and date; a signature records that the conversation happened, so include a line the teacher can check to note agreement or disagreement

Score only what you saw.

An item left blank reads as an oversight; "not observed today" reads as a check that happened.

Keep the evidence in the comments column too — a rating without an example behind it is an opinion, and opinions are what make evaluation meetings argumentative instead of useful.

Watch a normal day, not a performance.

Tell the teacher which week you will visit, and pick a stretch that includes arrival, at least one transition, and an activity block — long enough to see the room recover from something going sideways.

An announced window measures the teaching; a surprise visit measures nerves.

Work through the domains with look-fors you can phrase as a yes-you-saw-it or a no:

• Arrival and greeting: Does the teacher greet children by name and crouch to their level? Do families get a word, too?
• Transitions: Are they signaled before they start, with something for children to do in the gap — or does the room hear "stop" only after something breaks?
• Free play and centers: Does the teacher join the play and extend it — a new word, a new prop, a new question — or supervise from the perimeter?
• Group time: Are the quiet children drawn in gently? Do the teacher's questions have more than one possible right answer?
• Routines: Diapering, handwashing and meals are language and connection moments, not downtime the teacher endures.
• Guidance: When conflict starts, does the teacher narrate, hand children words and follow through — or jump straight to consequences?
• Positioning: Does the teacher scan, move and place themselves so the whole group stays in view, indoors and out?

When you want finer-grained vocabulary, Teachstone's CLASS 2nd Edition Pre-K–3rd organizes interactions into dimensions including Positive Climate, Educator Sensitivity, Behavior Management, Productivity, Concept Development, Quality of Feedback and Language Modeling.

Each names an observable behavior, which is what makes them useful item headings even for centers that never touch the instrument itself.

Some of what you watch is also regulated. Supervision, staff-to-child ratios and group sizes are set by your state's child care licensing rules, and those rules belong to your state child care licensing agency.

The evaluation form measures job performance; it does not decide whether a room meets a licensing requirement.

Where the two topics touch, confirm the current requirement with the agency rather than treating your form as the standard.

Put a self-evaluation on the back of the form: the same domains, rated by the teacher before you sit down together.

The gap between the teacher's scores and yours becomes the meeting's agenda, and an agenda built on that gap is more honest than either set of scores alone — it shows you where the teacher already knows where the work is, and where your read and theirs genuinely differ.

Alongside the domain ratings, give the self-evaluation its own prompts:

• Which part of your day runs most smoothly, and what makes it work?
• Which transition is hardest right now, and what have you already tried?
• If you could rearrange one area of the room tomorrow at no cost, what would you change?
• Which family conversations feel easy, and which ones do you put off?
• What is one skill you want to build this year, and what would building it take?
• Where do you want this classroom to be by the end of the year?

Make the skill question a place to name things, because the answers tell you what to budget for: additional coursework, the CDA — the Child Development Associate credential awarded by the Council for Professional Recognition — or a first step toward a director role are all answers that turn a vague wish for "training" into something the center can actually plan and pay for.

Treat self-scores as conversation data, not scoring data.

Never let the self-evaluation become a confession the observation later punishes; the fastest way to kill honest self-assessment is to quote it back as evidence.

Both documents go in the same file, and the teacher sees both.

Scores that stop at the meeting are paperwork.

Close every evaluation by writing a growth plan on the last page: at most two focus areas, chosen together, each one written so a stranger could check for it during a follow-up visit.

• The focus behavior, written as something observable — "asks open-ended questions during center time," not "improves questioning."
• The support the center provides — coaching, modeling, a course, materials, planning time — with a named owner for each.
• What better looks like, in the same words the form's rating labels use, so the follow-up scores against the same definitions.
• A follow-up date on the calendar before everyone leaves the meeting.
• One goal the teacher chose, even if it is not one you would have picked — the plan is theirs to own, not only to receive.

Whatever the results feed — professional-development spending, lead responsibilities, pay decisions or continued employment — apply the same criteria to every teacher in the same role and keep the completed forms.

Consistency is what makes the document fair, and documentation is what makes a later decision explainable.

Employment-law questions that come out of an evaluation belong with employment counsel, not inside the form.

The criteria also earn a second life in recruiting: when a lead position opens, the domains you just refined become the screening rubric for hiring preschool teachers — interview answers and working-interview observations score against the same definition of good, the same one you ask about in a preschool teacher interview.

That is the quiet payoff of a form built on observable behavior: everyone in the building, and everyone you interview, is measured against the same job.

This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. Evaluation practices are yours to set; where they touch state licensing rules — supervision, ratios, group sizes, staff records — confirm the current requirements with your state child care licensing agency, and take wage and employment-law questions to employment counsel or the relevant labor agency.