Evaluation Systems- What’s Your Focus?
I have been recently reading “The Teacher Wars” by Dana Goldstein that depicts the change of our educational system over decades of time.
One fascinating fact that Dana shared in her book was on evaluation systems. How boring of a topic, I know, but to be honest teachers complain the most about how they are evaluated. Many teachers wish the system focused on a checklist of items so they knew what to include when a principal would walk through their classrooms. Other teachers felt that type of evaluation system was not an accurate measurement of their performance when solely looking at whether or not that they had a particular poster mounted in the right hand corner of the classroom as noted on the evaluation checklist. The checklist has started to fade out and schools now use a rubric system based on “value-added,” meaning how much students are growing or how much value a teacher is adding to that student’s overall achievement. Sometimes this is hard to judge on a quick walk through of a classroom, which is what causes anxiety and discourse amongst teachers these days.
For these reasons, I thought it was interesting to see the difference in what a principal would be looking for in a teacher’s classroom in the 1920’s in comparison to today.
“Evaluation systems called for teachers to be judged on their personal characteristics and given numeric ratings in largely subjective categories, such as “obedience,” “honesty of work,” “dress,” “voice,” and “force of character. A teacher’s command of classroom discipline would also be assessed, by counting the number of students who were late or unruly, and even by measuring the number of seconds and minutes it took for a teacher to distribute or collect worksheets.” (Goldstein, 2014)
WOW! Can you believe it? haha I wish a principal would come rate me with that evaluation tool. I am obedient, honest, have character, dress professionally and convey my ideas in an appropriate tone of voice. My discipline is strong and my tight transitions for passing out papers is quite efficient, although I am not sure how many seconds are required to hit the proficiency mark. As much as I would LOVE to be evaluated with this tool, I do not think it would predict my effectiveness as a teacher. I do think it is helpful in hiring teachers, but it does not guarantee students will learn and grow in that teacher’s classroom.
What is even less effective is what the principals had to do next with this tool.
“Principals would painstakingly record all this data on spreadsheets- then handwritten, of course- and higher-level administrators could subsequently grade principals by looking at the performance of an entire school.” (Goldstein, 2014)
I am pretty sure principals would not be conducting very many walk-through observations if they had to collect such lengthy and time consuming data just to show to their boss in order to be rated as a school. I wonder how honest they were about teacher performance since their observations are tied to their own effectiveness?!
So, what I have learned is although it might have been simple and easy to in terms of evaluation of teachers back then, it surely did not produce quality teachers or successful students. Although I am not a huge fan of the value added rubrics that are currently circulating schools for teacher evaluations because it can be open to interpretation, I do believe they are focused on cultivating strong teaching techniques and collaboration as well as providing students with numerous opportunities to master content. When you start hating the evaluation time of year, just think back to how it used to be and remind yourself that this rubric is making you a better version of yourself for your kids. Celebrate the school system’s focus being on the right attributes- can you imagine how awful it would be if teachers in your school were only rated on dress, voice or honesty? Yikes!
If you could add a characteristic to a teacher’s evaluation tool, what would it be and why?
About the author, Gretchen
I am a teacher trainer and coach. Working elbow to elbow with teachers and teacher leaders to ensure instructional proficiency and student achievement soar lights me up. We have a real need in our nation for strong educators to remain in the field. My blog, book, podcast, courses and instructional materials are geared towards empowering teachers (and those that lead them) to receive the support needed to grow and thrive today, tomorrow and always.