How Should We Evaluate Teachers?6 Comments
We talk a lot about effective teachers on this site and in the national education conversation. However, this begs the question: how can effective teaching truly be identified? What makes an "effective" teacher? How should teachers be evaluated?
Dennis Van Roekel, President of the NEA, recently talked to John Merrow about his ideas, which include an evaluation of a teacher's professional practice along with student learning and academic gains. As many school districts across the country are facing budget cuts and layoffs this year, teacher evaluation takes on new importance. Their conversation is available via podcast on Merrow's blog--we encourage you to listen.
What are your thoughts on teacher evaluation? How do you think effective teaching should be measured?
Comments
They include- Ability to Motivate High Academic Engagement and Competence,Excellent Class Management. Ability to Foster a Positive, Reinforcing, Cooperative Environment, A Match between Accelerating Demands and Student Competence, and Connections across Curricula. Aren't these as important for evaluating teachers in upper grades? I didn't see any mention of evaluating teachers based on students' scores on standardized tests. Why? Because it doesn't tell the real story.
A retired teacher wrote,
"As any public school teacher knows, all classrooms are not created equal. The challenge for school systems that base teacher compensation on student performance is to comprehensively and fairly weigh variables when evaluating teachers.
It would be grand if all classrooms in each grade had the same number of students with comparable abilities and degree of emotional intelligence, backed up by the same level of parental cooperation and involvement; and if all classes in a school system and county and state had the same access to supplies and support personnel, the same level of comfort and attractiveness of school buildings, the same amount and quality of mentoring and access to professional development, and so on."
Personally, I have no problem with more accountability, more observation of my work, etc. I do have the same issues of trust that are mentioned in this article. Administration must be a part of the conversation as well as teachers and students.
Teachers are being scapegoated, I agree. Teachers are only one part of a problem system. Personally, my biggest daily problem is with administration. As a teacher, I feel like I am fighting a two-front war on a daily basis: one with my kids, where I can see a difference, and one with changing demands coming from the top down with no discussion or accountability, as far as I can see.
Collaboration is the key here, not competition. Teaching every child is not a "race," it is a practice.
Everyone should read "Teaching by Numbers" by Peter Taubman, Professor at Brooklyn College - this book just received the Outstanding Book Award in Curriculum Studies at the AERA meeting in Denver. http://routledge.com/books/details/9780415962742/
One more scholarly reference for this discussion is a book in both German and English edited by Thomas Jahnke and Wlfram Meyerhöfer, PISA & Co., which studied the international PISA test used in many countried. In mathematics, for example, the student scores for mathematical literacy in PISA can be taken as empirical evidence of a social construct. Given the PISA test's nominal definition of mathematical literacy, how were the test items developed or chosen? Is the theoretical framework consistent? Is the use of the scaling model justified, which implies assumptions on the structure of the competency to be measured? It emerges that the global and vague definition of mathematical literacy loses its meaning through its operationalisation in the form of PISA test items. The scaling model is based on assumptions, which are not suggested either by the definition of the construct or by the type of items used. However, in PISA the model is maintained despite its theoretical and empirical inconsistencies. Consequently, the student scores have no well-founded interpretation and do not allow for drawing conclusions about interrelationships with other data generated by the study. (intro to book available here: http://univie.ac.at/pisaaccordingtopisa/introduction_pisaaccordingtopisa.pdf)
Beyond such research that shows how impossible it is to use tests to evaluate learning and/or teaching, the very idea of evaluating teachers deskills teachers and deprofessionalizes teachers so much that it makes teaching into a corporatized machine rather than an aesthetic practice, destroying all hope of creative teachers teaching creative thinking.