Education is a noble and honorable enterprise — well-meaning, respectable, geared toward progress and success. For all its lofty intentions, though, we have a few glaring problems in education here in America. One of the most pernicious is the dark truth that the profession currently includes too many ineffective, lame, or even neglectful and abusive teachers. They make us all look bad, and, frankly, I’m ready to either clean house and get rid of them or find more assertive methods to remediate their training until they improve.
The first step is to identify weak teachers so we can address their shortfalls. How do we do this? Some districts are judging teachers by their students’ progress, tracking standardized test scores. While this seems to make sense statistically and objectively, this assessment is a shallow, superficial, and misleading measure of a teacher’s effectiveness.
Standardized tests reveal what students know about a collection of facts and concepts, but they can never reveal whether students are rising to their full potential, whether they’re creatively and intellectually stimulated, or whether they are becoming civic-minded, future-oriented, productive citizens. They can never gauge the reach of a teacher’s inspiration or the pull of a teacher’s encouragement. And they can never look inside a classroom to see little Sally-Lou celebrating with Mrs. Jones when she finally has the “aha!” moment and understands fractions and decimals, finally able to complete math problems on her own that she missed on that standardized test.
Conversely, standardized tests do not show the abusive sarcasm that some teachers use, or the drill and kill rote memorization that they inflict like punishment on their students. They cannot uncover the boredom and the desire for flight from school that such mediocre teaching produce. And they cannot reveal the crushing criticism and put-downs that some teachers carelessly dole out, nor the deflated and demoralized emotions that students suffer as a result.
A few weeks ago, an informal poll on my blog asked how teachers should be evaluated. The most popular answers produced a fairly respectable tie between peer observation and administrative observations. No surprise, because I began my teaching career in a district that encouraged peer observations (although they were difficult because of scheduling constraints) and made common practice of following a formal observation procedure that was tied to staff development and provided consistent feedback, similar to the recommendations in this ERIC document or in Charlotte Danielson’s model of a teacher professional development continuum. It was so common to be observed that students no longer blinked an eye or thought anything of it when a principal, teacher, or school board administrator came in and sat down in the room.
Was my experience with observations typical elsewhere? Curious, I asked a few teachers in a couple of the schools I visit whether their teaching has ever been observed in their classroom. More than one answered that she’s never been observed by the principal! Cursory walk-throughs by assistant principals often were the only classroom visits these teachers had experienced. Their evaluations at year-end were often based on workplace norms (”shows up to work 170 days out of 181″ or “attends staff meetings”) instead of being focused on the actual teaching experience or pedagogy.
In my opinion, whoever stands in front of a classroom to teach or walks among the students as a leader and guide should face both planned and unannounced classroom observations, followed by discussion, feedback, and reflection — and these evaluations should be conducted by both administrators and by peers.
One caveat that bears emphasis: The administrators who conduct teacher observations and evaluations should be model teachers themselves. Too often, mediocre teachers escape the classroom by rising to the administrative ranks. These “leaders” are not the ideal role models and instructional leaders that teachers need. They are as much a bane to education as poor teachers are themselves.
Two steps further
I want to go two steps further, however. Yes, teachers need regular formal evaluations and observations by their administrators. Yes, teachers need to emerge from their isolated classrooms and begin visiting each other’s classes frequently to share ideas, critique each other’s styles, and support each other as a professional community.
But what are the best mirrors of teacher performance? There are two more.
One of the most effective is videotaping and self-reflection. How often have you watched yourself teaching and, even more importantly, analyzed your teaching effectiveness? Watch yourself, listen to yourself, and watch the students’ reactions. It’s an eye-opening experience! Going through the process of becoming a National Board Certified Teacher requires videotaping lessons as part of the judging but also serves as a means for deeper and more analytical professional reflection. According to a publication by the NEA and the AFT, videotaping “will show the ‘total picture’ of your classroom. You want your video to convey—to the extent possible—the classroom climate, student engagement, interactions (both verbal and nonverbal), and your role in promoting classroom discourse.” (p. 35)
I know an administrator who carries a Flip camera to every observation, and records the lessons he observes, filming the students’ reactions as well as the instructor’s delivery. He shares the film with the teacher to reflect on the lesson, and then deletes the footage to protect the students’ privacy.
The second honest mirror is one that is rarely included but is often the most telling source of information — the student, who is a captive audience several hours a day with the teacher. What would happen if students were asked to evaluate their teachers? Would their opinions be useful? Sounds scary, doesn’t it? The worst-case scenario conjures images of vengeful students snickering as they write derogatory, inflamed accusations against their teachers, hoping to get them in trouble or even fired.
But what if negative reactions were rare, and students more often were honest in their appraisals of their teachers? What if their responses to a questionnaire about their teacher were kept private, seen only by the teacher if that were his or her choice? And what if these questionnaires were only used as a formative assessment, not as an evaluation that would “count” or decide a teacher’s fate?
Every year, I gave my students a such questionnaire and held my breath as I tallied the anonymous responses. The students were ruthless with their honesty but helpful with their suggestions. It only hurt a little bit to discover I needed to slow down my rate of speech, avoid micromanaging (stop constantly suggesting changes to their projects and rewording their text), or that the air freshener I plugged in was nauseating and it wasn’t fair that I drank sodas in front of them. I gained valuable insight into their perspectives about my teaching style, their feelings, and the quality of the classroom climate. Best of all, the questionnaires opened frank discussions with my classes about our learning processes. This generated ownership of their learning, an important tenet for my middle schoolers.
Here is a version of my questionnaire that you are welcome to use. You may look at the survey form that the students fill out, and if you want to gain access to the Google Document the form will generate, you have my permission. If you decide to use the questionnaire, please make your own copy so you can generate answers to your own spreadsheet.
Get honest. If you welcome administrators’ and peers’ observations as constructive evaluations, if you videotape your class to picture yourself more accurately as a teacher, if you ask students for their honest opinions, chances are you will see something to be proud of and value. Yes, you might see something you don’t like, but that’s when you put on your big-kid pants and set a path to make things right.
If we start with ourselves and learn to recognize our own weaknesses and work to strengthen our own instructional practice, then we can start organizing professional communities to put pressure on the slackers. It’s time to appraise the ranks and weed out the goldbrickers.
Photo of student with raised hand:
clickart collection
Photo of student with head down:
‘resting’ www.flickr.com/photos/75016602@N00/199276257
This blog expresses the personal opinions of the author and is not affiliated
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Posted on April 19th, 2009 by Sharon Elin
Filed under: Uncategorized
Great post. I love that you’ve included information about using your students as your personal assessors. As you stated, this can be brutal. But, it is truly one of the most eye-opening things that you can do with your classes. Allowing your students to criticize you will let you see a bit into their perceptions of their learning environments and how you can make or break them. Thanks for sharing your form. Am definitely moving mine to GoogleDocs this year!
Excellent post! I’m glad I subscribe. I can’t wait to share this with the folks at my school.
In your second sentence you said: “… we have a few glaring problems in education here in America.” I started reading your posting through the lens of that statement. But the further I read, the more I realised that you are really talking about our teachers in South Africa as well. Same story, same theme, same characters, same victims.
Thank you for this great post. It makes one think … I sincerely hope it will serve to make us (collectively) think about solutions.
[...] is how Sharon Elin starts her blog posting under the heading: The best mirrors. The article is worth reading in its entirety. What amazes me is the similarity of the [...]
Well done. In the busy lives of teachers, we often forget to take care of ourselves. By that, I mean work toward constantly honing our craft. Analogously, the same thing happens in our own physical health. We get busy and ignore that which we know is most important - eating well and exercising. I am as guilty as the next person in this. We must do a better job at recognizing that a critical part of teaching is not just assessing our students, but assessing our own effectiveness. It made me laugh when you wrote about administrative evaluations. Where I have worked, those evaluations were controlled by “policy”. Administrators had to give teachers advanced notice. Teachers got to sign up for evaluations, hence, supplied a bang-up “model” lesson song-and-dance for the evaluation, then went back to status quo teaching. Feedback was quick and often not all that professionally challenging. No video was ever used… Peer evaluation was seldom done because peers don’t want to appear critical or better than the observed teacher. Skins are thin.
We have a great deal of work to be done along these lines. Virtual communities that embrace openness perhaps have the ability to solicit feedback in unique and powerful ways. But, teachers who don’t want to be open about their practice certainly don’t want to do so in virtual, global teaching communities either.
Thanks for the good personal reminder here.
Great insight. I always anticipated my students’ responses to projects and would often have them critique assignments, but I never had them critique me. I’ll add this to my collection of things to remember as I return to the classroom…
That said, peer observation is such a powerful tool. When I was a mentor to new teachers, and when I was a new teacher myself, I think that observing masterful teachers was the most important piece of our training. When you observing a teacher as a teacher you look for different things, you analyze, and are forced to reflect on your own practices–what more could we ask of teachers?!