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The Toolbox contains a collection of articles with practical advice for school and classroom management.
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Teacher Evaluation: Some Improvement Needed
Human rResources directors (think Catbert) will argue that the principal’s most important job is to evaluate teachers.
From a human resources standpoint, good documentation is key when it’s time for contract renewal or termination.
In Ohio, it’s also the law, with procedures, dates, and time requirements laid out in exacting detail.
Here’s my own experience with the process, figured for one teacher, over the course of a school year.
1 Pre-Observation Conference = 1 hr.
4 Classroom Observations = 4 hrs.
4 Observation Narratives = 6 hrs.
4 Post-Observation Narratives = 4 hrs.
2 Evaluation Narratives = 4 hrs.
2 Evaluation Conferences = 2 hrs.
How does it all add up? If you evaluate 10 teachers, that’s 170 tasks, consuming a minimum of 210 work hours.
Evaluation eats up 5 weeks!
Five weeks well spent, perhaps, if the current system really improves teaching performance and enhance professional growth.
But is this the outcome? Or is it, like so many other legislated processes, the ritual we endure as issues of quality are addressed with quantity?
Improvement Needed
If you share my view that we need a better evaluation system, you’ve found friends in Charlotte Danielson and Thomas McGreal, authors of Teacher Evaluation to Enhance Professional Practice.
According to the authors, we need to change because “our goals for student achievement have evolved—we are now interested in more complex learning, in problem-solving, in the application of knowledge.”
New research on the brain and how it learns, she argues, “has made it clear that we need new approaches to teaching and, therefore, to the description and evaluation of teaching.”
For more on teacher evaluation:
Danielson’s & McGreal’s book >
Workshop on teacher portfolios >
Alternative education license >
