Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Reverend Al Sharpton and former Speaker New Gingrich were all on Meet the Press today. I agree with everything they said. Teacher evaluation needs reform, parents and communities need to be more involved, we need to be able to fire bad teachers. It's all true.
Teacher evaluation: tomorrow I will be evaluated. I will have a pre-observation meeting (only because I requested one) and my assistant principal will observe one of my lessons. These are the items she will look for: Is my aim in question format? Do I have state standards posted? Do I have student work posted on the wall? Is my Do Now under 5 minutes? Do I have a 10 minute mini-lesson? Do I have a 5 minute summary? Do I have a lesson plan? You can have all of these factors in place and students will not learn. Teaching is an art. Good teaching can look like a hundred different things. Artificial measurements on teaching detract from student learning. I don't need a mini lesson. I don't need to write out a lesson plan. Magically, I can hold that in my head. I may write down questions I know I need to ask, but how I get from point A to point B is going to vary between every period, and no plan will tell me how to navigate. Good teachers can turn on a dime when the class doesn't understand a concept. If that happens tomorrow, which it probably will, my assistant principal won't mention it. I'll jump through her arbitrary hoops and at the end of it, I'll receive a "satisfactory."
If my students who worked harder than everyone else and got better results than their classmates only got satisfactory, they'd revolt. Right now they're arguing over who got better stickers on their essays in the student work Hall of Fame, and talking big talk about their next essay that's going to make the board.
Satisfactory stickers don't exist for a reason, and they shouldn't exist for teachers either.
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I completely agree with what you wrote, I haven't written a plan in years. My plans are mostly magically in my head, too. But you know as well as I do that there are many teachers out there that should have to write down his or her plan to prove some sort of forethought on their part. It is unfortunate that so much of how we as teachers are evaluated is determined by the lowest denominators in our midsts.
ReplyDeleteA year ago, "differentiation" was all the buzz. Where is the differentiation for teachers? Why is my observation the exact same as one for a first year teacher and the same for a teacher who has taught for ten years?
Just found your blog and wanted to tell you I enjoy reading it - so I don't feel so much like a stalker :)
ReplyDeleteI have no doubt that you are an exceptional teacher. Those kids are lucky to have you.
Are you coaching lacrosse too?
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