Teacher Evaluations

Recently, someone brought to my attention an online focus project by The Hope Street Group. They're trying to find a better method to evaluate teachers. Taken from their site, www.hopestreetgroup.org:

"The majority of teacher evaluation systems in this country result in nearly all teachers being rated satisfactory, despite the fact that many schools are not meeting federal benchmarks for success. Evaluation systems are rarely linked to quality, targeted professional development to address improvement areas for teachers. Administrators are often not trained to conduct robust evaluations, nor held accountable for the results of their current systems."

Franky, I agree that teacher evaluations are essentially useless. I'll take some examples from this past year, my first year teaching (unsurprisingly, all my evaluations were satisfactory). Most of my recommendations included the words "Continue to use..." and the ones that didn't weren't very meaty. I honestly feel that as a first year teacher I could have used more substantive evaluations.

Honestly, I thrive on feedback, and its unfortunate that in general teachers get so little. Most of the time I felt very on my own, learning through trial and error the things that worked for me and the things that didn't. While the trial-and-error system may work fine for learning some things, I have to wonder if there wouldn't be a more efficient process for a first year teacher to learn.

I definitely think there could be a lot of improvement made in the teacher evaluation process. For one, teacher evaluation is a major responsibility for school administration, but its one that defiantly gets put on the back burner. Administrators have tons of other responsibilities, and teacher evaluations is very time-consuming. I know that there's definitely some relief once a teacher becomes tenured (only 2 evaluations a year instead of 4!).

Anyway, this will hopefully prove to be some interesting research they're doing, and I'm excited to be a part of it.