TEACHERS' EVALUATION

Teachers' Evaluation

Teachers' Evaluation

INTRODUCTION

One of the most vexing challenges for teachers and school administrators is the teacher evaluation process. Too often the formal observation is distorted by the observers themselves, who announce their visit in advance in an atmosphere of extraordinary stress and anxiety for nontenured teachers. At the other extreme is the present vogue of “walk-throughs,” which can seem casual and superficial, particularly when the observer is unclear about the expectations of the process. Walk-throughs can be effective, but they represent another case of the label being an insufficient guarantee of success. Marshall's new teacher evaluation rubrics seek to remedy this dilemma. Although the stakes can be high—he has used an earlier version of these evaluation forms, with the approval of the Boston Teachers Union, for formal teacher evaluation—the rubrics can also serve as an effective learning tool and formative assessment for teachers and administrators. The key to their utility is their exceptional specificity and consistency. This paper discusses teachers' evaluation.

Discussion

The impact of effective teaching on student achievement is well documented. Unfortunately, the pursuit of effective teaching strategies in an unfocused way has the opposite effect of what is intended. Some states have established official observation protocols that require administrators to check off each effective strategy that they observe, implying that an effective classroom teacher would bounce like the silver ball in a pinball machine, from hypothesis testing to comparisons to nonlinguistic representations. Teachers respond to an increasing list of diverse demands not with greater effectiveness but with weariness, mistrust, and disengagement. The only comic relief for them might be when they notice that the district staff development catalog has added a 118th seminar, the one about the importance of focus for teachers and principals. (Paulson 2010)

A focus on effective teaching, therefore, is not about workshops or checklists, but about deliberate practice. Barthwal (2010) notes that “teaching, like any complex cognitive skill, must be practiced to be improved” (p. 147). As we noted in Chapter 6, a consensus of scientific evidence in a variety of domains, including athletics, music, decision making, and chess, to name a few, concludes that deliberate practice is the key to improved performance. The components of deliberate practice include performance that is focused on a particular element of the task, expert coaching, feedback, careful and accurate self-assessment, and—this is the key—the opportunity to apply feedback immediately for improved performance. (Barthwal 2010)

But deliberate practice is far from the professional learning model provided to teachers. Often professional learning activities are characterized by a series of one-way transmissions. If there is any pretense toward interaction, it is limited to the suggestion that participants discuss what they have learned from the past 20 minutes of uninterrupted transmission of information.

High-impact learning requires a radical transformation from transmission to focus and deliberate practice. For example, Willingham (2009) suggests that teachers videotape their lessons and then watch the tapes alone and with a colleague, and after careful review, identify specific opportunities for improvement in professional ...