Buy this car. I'm serious. Come on. This car has been around a long time. It has proven its worth. It deserves to be on the road and anyway, the rules are that you can't buy another car until this one is purchased.
I wouldn't buy the car in the photo. I don't have the time and money to make it queen of the road, and I don't need test results to know that. Unfortunately, because we can't seem to design a better system of teacher evaluations than seniority, this "you have to take it" policy is what many buildings face when they have a position to fill.
The system is faulty, and districts and their communities are trying to fix it by placing more weight on student test scores. We don't need test scores to identify ineffective teachers, we just need to make it easy for administrators to evaluate their staff. I think it can be easy, and measurable, because you can kick a teacher's tires, so to speak.
While test scores can be affected by a child's day, the test's consequences (or lack of), or the test itself, watching what children are doing in a classroom immediately reveals the teacher's ability to teach. While a teacher may have an off day – and I've had my share – an off day would be outnumbered by effective days.
What about creating a walk-through check list for administrators? How about requiring administrators to do frequent walk-throughs of their teachers, checking their observations against a checklist of best practices? If a teacher fails to meet most of the best practice expectations for a few walk-throughs in a row, that teacher is placed on probation in the hopes that things change. If things don't improve, that teacher loses her spot and is placed back in the pool of teachers applying for a job. You might say we already have this policy – but we don't. My principal spent the better part of his year last year trying to follow the steps to remove a teacher from the work force. It was a vague, time-consuming process with fifty-billion steps and strategies. Let's make it simple. Let's give principals the tools they need to keep good teachers working with kids.
I'm thinking:
1) students are actively engaged in classroom activity
2) students can explain the activity and its goals
3) the teacher can explain how she / he will assess whether or not the goals have been met
4) there is evidence in the room of student learning
We have lists of identifiable things excellent teachers do. They are specific, definable, and the kinds of things one could put on a checklist. Doug Lemov has done the work for us; all we have to do is make a list and tell administrators to use it. We have to ask our unions to support high expectations for best practices, because if we continue to ask our unions to simply protect our jobs the public will continue to try to evaluate us with things like test scores.
Do you think test scores are the best measure of a teacher's effectiveness? Are they the most reliable? Would a walk-through system work, and if not, what are its obstacles? What are the easily-identifiable indicators of a teacher's effectiveness you'd put on the list?
I like it, Kristin. I agree that we don’t need to look at test scores to tell if a teacher is or isn’t doing his job. But I also think we should do everything possible to support teachers before it’s too late.
Here in Arizona, several school districts are toying with different types of teacher evaluation instruments to meet the new changes in education law.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/08/01/20100801grading-teachers-arizona.html
The trick, I think, will be in educating the public on how to interpret data that is released to the public about teacher evaluations and effectiveness (if it has to be released at all).
My heart is still a bit heavy for the teachers in Los Angeles right now…
I like your list Kristin. I would add a box to check every time the teacher was seated at his desk looking at the computer screen instead of being out in the room with the students. I get a lot more questions from students just by being in close proximity to them. And during my planning time as I walk through the building I see a lot of teachers at their computers with their students on their own.
You’re right, Mark. I just read through the very lengthy document that spells out the five levels of skill one might see in about forty descriptors of good teaching. My district plans on using this, in its ongoing efforts to really evaluate us. The rubric is so wordy, and obviously trying to include everything (which is how Seattle does everything), that it is not a usable document.
One of the categories has to do with collaboration with parents. While this may be an important part of teaching well, it’s not something an administrator can quickly assess. Administrators have a lot to do beside assess teachers, and they need to have an efficient way to assess them.
I am afraid that, because teachers can’t agree on an efficient and effective way to evaluate teachers, and one that has some real teeth to it, someone else will step in with ways to evaluate teachers (like testing), that are really problematic.
I think there are many “dispositions” (buzz word from long ago?) which effective teachers do demonstrate and which can be witnessed in their interactions with students.
To what degree does the teacher talk over students versus waiting for their attention?
What on-the-fly measures does a teacher use for informal assessment of student understanding?
Do the students seem to know what to expect from this teacher…not in a boring what but in a way which facilitates clear understanding? (Routine, communciation, habits.)
Does the teacher treat students respectfully? (And let’s be honest…an awful lot of teachers I see don’t treat kids with respect.)
These, alas, illustrate my own personal biases. I think part of the problem such a checklist might face is that coming to agreement about what “effective teaching” looks like is very challenging. There has been a task force in WA to define critera for “Master Teacher,” and that document (wherever it ended up…I know CSTP was involved) might be a starting point.