By Lillie Marshall
Like other states across the country, mine (Massachusetts) is in the midst of piloting a new teacher evaluation system. I'm a teacher, so this matters deeply to me. But it also matters to anyone with any stake in education, as the impact of how we measure teacher effectiveness will be immense.
Now, how are these evaluations going so far? Last month, Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellows sent a survey to teachers in Massachusetts's Level 4 Turnaround Schools, who are currently piloting the new system. While the purpose of pilots is, of course, to iron out the kinks in something before rolling it out more broadly, the data compiled from the 112 responses is still concerning and eye-opening, and it points to some major areas for improvement:
• 41% of teachers rated their evaluator as fair or poor overall
• 35% rated the quality of their evaluator's feedback as fair or poor
• 45% rated their evaluator fair or poor in content knowledge
This needs fixing urgently. Across the country, districts are pouring money and time into the supervision and evaluation process to make it a major component of teacher retention, improvement, and staffing, which means if we're not getting this right, it has the potential to sabotage everything else. It becomes a waste of time and money we don't have to spare.
But in my experience, it is possible to define and implement excellent teacher evaluation. I'm lucky, as a Boston Latin Academy teacher, to have experienced exemplary evaluation.
I urge other schools and districts to embrace the key factors that make BLA's evaluation process so effective:
1. My evaluator has strong content knowledge and credibility, so her feedback is useful, relevant, and actionable. As a teacher at BLA, I am supervised and evaluated by the History and ELA Department Head, Tracy Wagner, rather than by the Headmaster. Tracy was a highly effective English teacher for ten years with a similar student population, so she knows her stuff, and I trust her. The action steps she provides work.
2. My evaluator pops into my classroom at least 10 times a year for 10-20 minutes, unannounced, announced, or invited. These frequent, varied observations provide Tracy with a much more authentic understanding of me as a teacher than just one or two fancy, announced, full-class observations. She's caught me being a phenomenal teacher, and has also seen moments of shame, but ten varied visits provide her with a picture of me that is actually ... me!
3. During her observations, my evaluator looks at student work and talks with students to gauge understanding. By analyzing student progress over ten different visits (rather than just focusing on teacher moves), Tracy is able to give me concrete feedback on what skills my students are getting, and suggestions for which specific skills I should focus on next.
4. The main way my evaluator gives feedback is through short, verbal conversations very soon after each observation. Though Tracy always provides me with two pages of notes with written action steps, the most useful element of her feedback is the casual verbal conversation we have after every observation. Let's be real: a specific, frank, timely conversation provides teachers with far more valuable feedback than a formal observation write-up. Talking allows me to give Tracy the context of the other 99% of my teaching which she doesn't observe, and lets us delve deeper into her observations and next steps.
5. My evaluator aims, above all, to be useful. Tracy explained this to me: "How I see it, my job is to meet each teacher wherever they are in the path to improving their craft, and to walk them further along that journey."
My students and I have reaped the benefits of this differentiation. In a February observation, Tracy noticed that my kids were doing well selecting evidence in their essays, but needed more instruction in analyzing how that evidence proved their theses. Directly after giving me that verbal feedback, Tracy printed out three excellent lessons on analysis and shared them with me, and I implemented them in my class. Come our April observation, I was thrilled to hear Tracy note that the lessons worked, because she saw much stronger analysis in my students' writing. "Now that they've got the foundation set," Tracy said, "you can teach lessons on spicing up word choice." She proceeded to provide lesson resources on how to do that.
With another teacher, Tracy would help in a different way. I've been teaching for eight years, but for a newer teacher, Tracy might offer resources on classroom management. She also helps us collaborate across our 94-teacher school by connecting teachers who are perfectly poised to help each other. How lovely it is, as professionals, to have affirmation that we're growing, and to receive concrete ways to produce further growth.
Some educators fear teacher supervision and evaluation because it's associated with a "gotcha!" mentality, as if the main purpose of evaluating is to point out the bad in teachers and get them fired. When done right, however, evaluation in any career provides not only accountability, but also a welcome boost to the next level of excellence.
Lillie Marshall is a Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellow and a teacher in the Boston Public Schools. She runs two teacher-travel websites, www.AroundTheWorldL.com and www.TeachingTraveling.com and tweets at @WorldLillie. Read about Lillie's recent travels to China with Boston Public Schools students.
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Harriet Sanford: Addressing the Other Side of Teacher Evaluation
Of course, none of that matters if the evaluator doesn't have a background in the subject or age group!
I find conversation and staff development (that I choose) to be useful. Evaluation, not so much.
The accountability comes from the students that you see every day. It doesn't take many mediocre lessons to lose a class.
About as useful as explaining to and Ayatollah that he ought to become Christain.
Teachers, with the exception fo the newest, reject any evaluation that goes lower than "meets expectations", recommends at least a standard raise, and that she be considered for summer school, and a little bit for a club sponsorship.
They reject the idea of evaluation of teacher as the Knights Templer fought heresy.
They are of the absolute and fundamental belief that it is absolutely impossible to design an evaluatlion of teachers that actaully evaluates teachers. That is the explanation of the universal disdain for the evaluators.
Elsewhere on the site, I have suggested a solution that would be acceptable to teachers, and has decreased anxiety among teachers in New York.
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/nyregion/16rubber.html
The NY Times was very negative about this program, but if it were made voluntary for teachers, and could be available four out of every five years, this could eliminate all the problems about evaluation of teachers.
Evaluation is a necessary and helpful process that ensures that our students are receiving high-quality education. It is rare to encounter a teacher who does not want to improve. We all tell our students that they can always be improving; we believe the same things about ourselves.
Thank you for your positive response. You are fanned for giving me some encouragement, and not hurling insults.
Let me give you something that a professor said. The problem with people who know a lot, or are good at something, don't appreciate it may not be easy for everyone else.
I think that the problem with math teachers is that they "see through the problem" easily, and then may sometimes not be able to explain it.
The two classes at Amundsen High School in Chicago that I enjoyed were Algebra 3 and Trigonometry.
I'm sure it was because the two teachers like what they taught, and like kids.
I would think that with computer aided teaching, you could do much more as a math teacher.
If you haven't see it yet, check Google: "gamification".
Two academic designed a game to solve a unsolved problem in attacking the HIV virus. Opened the game to the world.
They kept having to make it more difficult to keep the attention of the "gamers" who worked on it. It took two weeks to solve the problem.
I do know that some people find math fascinating and somewhat addictive. Why couldn't math be taught as some sort of game?
Maybe you could invent such a game, a make a million dollars.
Of course teachers will always be needed. An NFL quarter back has his own coach (teacher).
The usual line from the reform crowd is to hold teachers accountable while also offering support for improvement. They seem to be completely unaware of just how limited an impact the typical evaluator or professional development activity has on what we actually do in the classroom.