By Tom
Last week I had my final evaluation conference with my principal. I volunteered to do a comprehensive evaluation this year, so it was a long one. And it went well. Now that I’ve had a week to reflect on the whole affair I’ve come up with three conclusions.
First of all, TPEP is a lot better than what we had before. I’m not sure how your district used to do teacher evaluations, but in my district it was a joke. We basically chose our own goals, as well as the evidence by which we would be assessed on those goals. We then collected that evidence and presented it to our principals. It was essentially impossible to fail, as long as you chose a goal that you knew you could achieve, which everyone did.
With TPEP, we’re measured by standards. We have to show that our teaching lines up to best practices. My district uses the Danielson Framework, which is fairly easy to comprehend and seems to spell out pretty much everything a competent teacher should do. Principals now have standards against which to measure teacher performance. Like I said, TPEP is a lot better than what it replaced.
Secondly, TPEP is a lot of work – for principals. My principal spends an average of fifteen hours per week on TPEP-related activities. That’s a lot of time, which begs the obvious question: What is he not doing? What he’s not doing is working with students, talking with parents, eating, sleeping and spending time with his family. We have a part-time dean of students, which helps us here at school, but I worry about the man’s private life. I’m sure the legislature didn’t intend to completely overburden people who were already completely overburdened, but they did.
And that brings me to my third conclusion. Let’s remember that the main purpose for the creation of TPEP was to make it easier to fire ineffective teachers. But at this point I’m not sure TPEP will actually achieve that goal. Consider a situation that I’m aware of: A teacher is ineffective in nearly every aspect of his job. The classroom is disorganized and unsafe. Learning is barely happening. Yet this guy somehow manages to pull it together for both of the required principal observations and is able to document some student growth over the course of the year. What happens?
Not much. According to TPEP, this teacher will probably keep on teaching, for two reasons. First of all, his overall scores won’t look that bad; at least not bad enough for dismissal. Secondly, in order to document just how incompetent this teacher is, the principal would need to spend a ton of time observing and meeting with him. Time that he doesn’t have. The irony of TPEP is that it demands so much of a principal’s time that he doesn’t have any time to fire bad teachers, which was the whole purpose of TPEP in the first place.
TPEP is new. Everything that’s new has glitches. I’m confident that in a few years we’ll work them out.
Tom, TPEP is taking a toll on my principal too. I completely agree with you that it beats the pants off any other evaluation system we have had so far. And like you, I am skeptical. In the first year of TPEP, I saw my insightful administrator needing to neglect important aspects of running our school in order to survive. In our third year of implementation, TPEP has fallen into a more sustainable pattern which makes it more manageable. We do comprehensive evaluations every three years and student growth only on the other years. Student growth barely involves Danielson and is a problematic choose-your-own-goal model. Don’t get me wrong: I prefer this to having growth evaluated by measures determined by people outside the classroom, but it cheapens the process for all of us. Downsizing it has made TPEP feel less about professional growth and more about dotting “i’s” and crossing “t’s”. I hope the need for efficiency doesn’t make us iron the beauty out of Danielson in order to get the job done. I’d love to hear of better solutions to the tension between time for wise evaluation and running schools with limited administrative resources. .
We don’t have teachers to spare. By the time that someone is hired to teach they have a significant commitment to the profession. Call me overly optimistic, but I believe that teachers want to do the best they can for their students. TPEP is a good beginning, as a tool it can identify strengths and needs. My optimism concerns what happens next because we need to look around and see who we all are as teachers, what are our collective talents, how we differ and what we can share and learn from one another. Principals cannot be the only arbiter of professional development, we need to learn in community and from community. It would require release time to work in one another’s classrooms, to plan together and reflect on our practices together but this can be done. In fact, in many schools these learning communities are already the norm.
While I agree with many aspects of your blog (TPEP is a huge improvement over the old evaluation system) I have to largely disagree with the reason that TPEP was created. TPEP is not created to “fire ineffective teachers” as you claim, but to help teachers improve on their craft. All teachers can improve on their craft and many first and second year teachers struggle in many areas including classroom management which could lead to a “disorganized or unsafe” environment at times.
The goal of every principal and teacher should be to educate and that shouldn’t end when someone graduates from your building. As a teacher myself, I take pride in helping other teachers improve their craft and grow as professionals. I can tell you during my 12 year career that many times I have seen a young teacher and wondered if they would make it due to the difficulty of transitioning from college to career and some of those teachers have become great colleagues and wonderful assets to the staff.
I hope that principals don’t see the TPEP as a punitive measure with the focus on weeding out teachers like you do, instead see it as a way to help teachers improve their craft.
And Mark, hopefully that’s the direction we’ll move toward.
David, I’m sorry but I honestly don’t understand your comment. Perhaps you could clarify.
After hearing from Tom on facebook, I get what he means about the “intention” of TPEP being to fire bad teachers–that was the way-back-when intention of policymakers who wanted to “hold all teachers accountable,” but that as policy transitioned to practice, it became what evaluation is supposed to be: promoting growth and learning. Just look at the words on the TPEP shield at the top of this post: Focus on Learning, Support Growth, Guide Instruction.
To me, evaluation and assessment are the same thing in many ways. I don’t treat classroom assessment as the opportunity to “figure out which students don’t get it so I can give them Fs,” and neither is the purpose of evaluation to find out which teachers are bad and fire them. In both cases, the system if used as intended, will result in those people improving toward their full potential–if they take advantage of the opportunities and tools provided.
Or… if it worked well, maybe the teachers who otherwise would have been released might improve. Isn’t that the purpose of evaluation? The way you describe it, it’s almost as if the idea of evaluation has been co-opted for political purposes…