#teacherevaluation

Learning During the Teacher Evaluation Process

I’ve been in a copious amount of interviews throughout my time as an educator. Fortunately, I’ve been on both sides of the interview table, as part of the hiring committee and as a potential employee. In almost every interview, someone asks some kind of question concerning teacher evaluation (as they should. It’s an important part of the job). In regards to questions about teacher evaluation, I…

I am neither a politician nor activist but it doesn't take much mental processing to look at the new standards for student performance and evaluation to notice something missing from the equation.

Life outside of school.

Shouldn't that be figured in to the big calculator that spits out a teacher's performance number?

I mean, school is not the entire measure of a student's life and evaluating performance without looking at all of the factors that have a direct effect on that performance is not seeing the whole picture.

How many times have you had a student who doesn't complete homework because they had a game or other after-school activity or seen a kid walking into school eating an Eggo waffle wrapped in a paper towel or sneaking something out of their snack because they didn't have time for breakfast at home?

Then there's sleep. Students are tired. Many stay up way later that we ever did when we were that age. They are exhausted from running to sports and dance class, seeing tutors, playing video games and just plain staying up too late.

When we get up on our soap box and demand teacher accountability, we should pause and look in the mirror at the person making those demands and recognize that that person should also be held accountable. That if we are collecting data for teacher performance evaluations we need to have all of that data that effects student performance and that means collecting data on their lives outside of teacher control and holding parents accountable as well.

Aaron Feuer is CEO and cofounder of Panorama Education, a Boston-based company that helps schools improve through data analytics

Teacher evaluation is really hard to define and measure.  I certainly learned in my 35 year teaching career that all students do not respond to the same person in the same way.  I was very successful with most students, but there are those who are harder to teach or reach, and they probably did not learn much in my classroom.  I never gave up, but overall teacher success is hard to measure.  Social issues today are so severe and distracting - attendance, drugs/alcohol(students and parents), poverty, racial/ethnic diversity, to name a few, that a teacher is more and more limited when actually trying to focus on subject matter and skill building.  I always use the starfish analogy:  Someone is walking on a beach covered by starfish that were washed up during a storm. She calmly walks along, picking up starfish and throwing them back in the ocean.  Another walker passed by and asked why she bothered at all; "There are thousands stranded on this stretch of beach alone- you can't think you are making a difference."  The woman picked up yet another starfish and replied." To this one, I make ALL the difference."

It is really hard to evaluate teacher effectiveness when each of us and each student has a personal perspective.  Of course, there are standards of language, behaviors, content mastery, preparation, but I have never seen an evaluation tool that I thought was fair and effective.  I understand there needs to be accountability, but so much seems dependent on circumstances - grade level, student behaviors, past acquired skills, courses - variables impossible to quantify.  I usually comes down to the individual Supervisor's skill and personal preferences, and that is not always a fair assessment.

Job performance evaluations are a part of every occupation. They can be ways to reward good performance and aid in improvement of skills.

The issue with teacher job performance evaluations is that too often the role of the students, parents and those things far out of the teacher’s control are not considered.

One of the downfalls is that, unlike the business world, teachers must meet standards imposed without consideration as to the students and the many issues that walk in the classroom door with them. The common core standards as they are being imposed in some states and districts require a lock step approach to the curriculum. This does not take into account the needs of the students and the outside factors that could hamper learning. Teachers are expected to have every student meet the day’s goals. This is not realistic. 

It is once again non-educators or those who have been out of the classroom for awhile imposing unrealistic expectations. Students are not in lock step. They bring emotional and family issues with them that the teacher cannot ignore when they are present and that will impede learning. Good teachers manage instruction to meet the needs of the students; evaluations too often only look at test scores and how the teacher has met the rigors of the imposed curriculum pace.

What evaluation should include is not only how well the curriculum has been constructed and managed to meet educational goals, but how well the teacher works with the students in those many emotional and social areas that students deal with every day. Yes, teachers must teach the curriculum, but just as important is the way teachers help students grow in these other areas.

I always felt as a teacher that my job was not just to get through the curriculum, but to help students develop life skills that would serve them as they faced interpersonal relationships throughout their life. Those areas are not part of the curriculum imposed by the state standards, but are crucial to the growth of the student. Teachers are at times the only consistent adult in the student’s life and the student will look to the teacher to help with these concerns which must be faced if any learning is to be done. I could not move ahead with the curriculum if the students were dealing with interpersonal issues or parental issues or homelessness or hunger or any number of things not related to the day’s lesson. 

"According to a new administrator I recently met, teacher evaluation has become a time-consuming nightmare. He explained that he had taken a lengthy required  course to learn to evaluate teachers the summer before he became an administrator, and the resulting process led to a contradictory evaluation. His example was that at the beginning of  the evaluation, he was supposed to rate the teachers on taking personal interest in their students: did the teacher greet the students personally as they entered the classroom and make them feel important? Later in the evaluation he would have to give the teachers negative marks if they did not spend equal time with each student, which could take valuable minutes from teaching time if they had. The new process is supposed to be more thorough and effective, but to him seemed to be as subjective as the earlier methods his principals had used when evaluating him. Obviously teacher evaluation is an important tool in helping teachers become more effective and more efficient, and maybe in the end this new process will attain its goals. Let us hope so for the sake of both the teachers and their students."