Bringing the 4 Rs to Teacher & Principal Evaluation
In reading this article, I found a lot of good ideas about how to make evaluations more of a working document that shows actual growth. A couple of the ideas:
Rigor - a 2005 study in Illinois found that only 17% of the school districts had given ANY teacher an unsatisfactory!! Really? That doesn't happen here in Cobb, but the article talks about making sure the rigor is real because giving a bad teacher the same rating as a good teacher demeans the hard work a good teacher does. This really applies to the "emerging" standard on our evaluation. How can a teacher of the year and a teacher who is just sitting watching kids both be emerging?
Relevance - This is the area I found particularly interesting. The article discusses teachers setting their own goals, ones that are meaningful and relevant to them but still align to the standards set by the district. Wow, what a great idea! The article also says that if teachers can work as a group or team, setting up identical or similar goals, then the relevance goes up even more. I would love to see teachers sitting down and deciding what some of their evaluation goals would be. I know as a special education reading teacher I could have written one about maintaining pre-test, middle, and post-test data on all my students. Another goal could have been to raise the reading level of the group by one grade level. These are goals that would have been meaningful, measurable and relevant to me and ones that I would have been comfortable being rated on. Teachers would be more involved and have greater buy in if this process was used.
Relationships - One of the things I hear most about evaluations is that teachers don't feel that the administrator evaluation them really knows them and the classroom they teach in. How can someone who you only see once for 30 minutes really understand and rate you? What if they don't understand what you even teach? (that one happened to me!) This article discusses administrators having real relationships, not friendships, with the people they evaluate. Maybe Cobb could require multiple classroom observations? I like this idea, but I am not sure how much time administrators have to visit all the classroom teachers they evaluate. I do thing that having someone who actually knows you and what you teach is important.
Results - In the past, results of our evaluations were negligible. Nothing really happened to you if you got a fantastic evaluation or a middle of the road evaluation. That changed last year when for the first time, without warning, teachers were fired based on evaluations. That changed how teachers viewed the evaluations from a necessary inconvenience to a criminal trial. Neither view point is helpful. Teachers should not fear evaluations, they should welcome them as methods to help them grow. Teachers should view evaluations the way we tell students to view pre-tests, as a measure of what we already know and what areas we need to grow in. Here's an idea, what if we did three evaluations a year? A start of the year evaluation where we set goals with our administrators and maybe even our team teachers, a mid year evaluation to see where we are going right and what we need to improve on, and an end of the year evaluation that has meaning, isn't a big surprise, and truly reflects our job as a teacher. Cobb County are you listening???
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