Ignition for Education

In a post last week, I discussed the possibility of a cultural shift among teachers, to teaching our profession to and learning our profession from each other; to becoming, as I put it, “a community of students of pedagogy.” I suggested ways in which we could teach and learn from each other: informal discussions, observations, and mentoring of novice teachers. This post focusses on how evaluation of teachers could function within such a culture.

Firstly, teachers should receive evaluation based not on their professional achievements, participation, or popularity, not on standardized test scores (a singularly useless way of evaluating students or teachers), attendance at football games and other optional activities, or positive comments that the administration hears from parents, but on their participation in the community of students of pedagogy. A teacher should state which teaching methods (including methods of classroom management, curriculum writing, lesson planning, evaluation of students, delivery of feedback to students, communication with parents, and participation in the broader life of the school) they have used over the course of a school year, or perhaps two or three school years. They should state their impression of how successful these methods have been, and, where appropriate, support their conslusions with evidence, such as students’ writing—writing by all the students in a class, from more than one point in a school year. They should know that they need not be afraid to say if a method has been unsuccessful, provided they can detail which methods they will use in its place. In any case, they should detail their future plans, whether to build on existing methods, experiment with new ones, or do some of both.

A group of other teachers, selected at random, should read the information that the evaluation candidate has supplied, interview the candidate, observe their lessons (sometimes with, sometimes without prior announcement), examine their curriculum and lesson plans, their assessments, and their students’ work. They should comment, in writing, on whether the candidate’s assessment of their own teaching is accurate, on how their teaching might grow within the use of their existing methods, and on other methods that they might try. The final evaluation should consist of their written report.

The report should contain comments only, nor numbered scores or letter grades. It is comments that are helpful in the growth of a teacher. Scoring of any kind is a crutch. Teachers receiving high scores may be tempted to rest on their laurels. Teachers receiving low ones may be tempted to despair, give up on their efforts at growth, or give themselves reasons why the scores are invalid, and, therefore, why they should not trust the comments either.

School leaders should be involved in this process. They should come alongside and observe the evaluation process for some or all of their teachers. However, they should not contribute to the evaluation report for any of their teachers. Instead, they should evaluate the evaluative process, with a view to further training their faculty in the administration of it.

Except in cases in which a teacher has to be terminated for gross misjudgments, retention should be based on evaluation reports. The final decisions could be made by school leaders, but, in my opinion, it would be best made by a faculty committee or senate (which could also have a role in running the evaluation process and training teachers to participate in it). After all, school leaders are not necessarily better at teaching than the teachers they lead, and being a good teacher does not mean one would necessarily make a good school leader. It does, however, mean that one can evaluate teachers and help them to grow.

Between this and last week’s post, I’ve suggested quite a lot of extra responsibilities for teachers. I’m going to suggest more when I post about curriculum writing. Yet teachers are already busy. The solution is to reduce our teaching loads so that we can participate in training, evaluation, and curriculum writing, and perhaps in other parts of the management of the school. Of course, this means schools and districts will have to hire more of us, and they may also have to raise salaries to attract credible candidates. These are yet more reasons why education is worthy of progressive tax dollars.