Teacher Assessment and Evaluation: The Mentoring Aspect

Can any teacher be categorized in only
five, simplistic ratings?

As we talk about mentoring students and creating equitable learning environments, how does a teacher assessment and evaluation affect a teacher’s ability to respond to minorities?

Glad you asked. Because when a teacher assessment and evaluation is done the right way—I repeat, when it is done the right way—it is an opportunity for teachers to spot areas to improve. Of course that’s not how evaluations are being handled; right now, they are scary tests that depend on someone else’s performance.

Sad experience has taught us how not to perform evaluations. So now let’s look at how teacher assessment and evaluation can actually make a better experience for everyone involved.

In South Carolina, Graig Meyer is director of the Blue Ribbon Mentor-Advocate group. He has several Equity and Innovation videos on PD 360 that show how he and his team are there for minority students, giving them a chance at life after high school. And the program is phenomenally successful—100% of students who graduate through the BRMA program go on to post-secondary studies.

If a student makes one grade below a B, the student gets tutoring. Now imagine that your principal or coach comes to you with a few areas noted in your observation/evaluation and said, “I can see that you have what it takes, and you just need some training in these areas. So here’s what we’re going to do….” Unheard of, isn’t it? And yet the ramifications would be immense! If this same model helps 100% of students become college and career ready, then it would certainly have a similar effect on teachers.

If we use teacher assessments and evaluations to actually train our teachers instead of just to scare the wits out of them, then teachers will ask to be observed. They’ll ask for another evaluation. They’ll have the tools they need to do what they love to do best: help students learn.

We suffer under the delusion of treating our teachers like worker bees and expect them to turn around and treat their students with individualized attention. Teacher evaluations and assessments are meant to be classrooms rather than courtrooms. When our teachers become more effective, we will be able to see 100% of students become college and career ready.

"The Deia Sanders Show" - No Talking, Please.

Post on Job-Embedded Professional Development for Teachers

 [EDITOR'S NOTE: In reply to the March 16th post, "When Job-Embedded PD Failed...Sort Of," Deia Sanders has written the following truly insightful article. I hope you enjoy her candor, but I hope even more that you may learn from it. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Deia Sanders!]

Our school has been fortunate enough (though not all would call it "fortunate") to pilot the new teacher evaluation system that the state of Mississippi will be adopting in 2014. It’s lengthy, nit-picky, and some might say nearly impossible. But for students it’s changing our classes to highly engaged, thought provoking, inter-related lessons like we had not seen previously.

image courtesy of family.wikinut.com

When I began teaching I had one purpose: to get my point across. I didn’t like noise, and I loved a quiet classroom where everyone was on task and listening to me.  The following year I began to loosen up a little and became comfortable with minimum talking and sometimes even let students compare answers.  It wasn’t until my third year of teaching that I realized I could ask a question and the students could discuss and come up with more answers than I had even thought of.   Before then,  I didn’t have the confidence as a classroom teacher to hand the learning over to the students.  I thought my job was to teach.  I didn’t know the students could learn more from each other than they ever did from me.  I had no idea what the next level of teaching looked like because no one had ever shown me… and for that matter, had no idea what level of teaching I was doing.  My students always grew, so we assumed there was a great deal of learning taking place, but  we never pinpointed why or how to get more out of them.

Now we have the teacher evaluation instrument that is no longer a list of boxes where you check yes or no.  It’s a deeply comprehensive evaluation that pinpoints where you are on the continuum of great teaching.  As a coach I’ve been able to use the evaluation instrument before the principal goes in for the official evaluation. I observe and nitpick as if it’s the “real deal.” Then we sit and discuss the evidence. There are multiple reasons for every ranking, and even better, I’m able to point them to what the next level of teaching says in the instrument and give them strategies for what that looks like in their classroom.  We are seeing this awareness move willing teachers fast.  It doesn’t have to take two to three years of “The Deia Sanders Show” to figure out that’s not how students learn best. We are able to move teachers forward faster, and in the end move our students!

We have seen quiet classrooms where learning was taking place become engaging vibrant classrooms where the student’s discussion and responses have shocked us.  Classes similar to  my first couple of years, where students were learning and growing, and considered successful, have now become classes with higher order thinking and learning beyond the limits of our state’s test.

 I am excited… let me say that again… I AM EXCITED about what teacher evaluation is bringing to our kids!   And  as for our teachers… they are actually excited, too! Everyone wants to be good at their job, and this is a way of showing them what good to great looks like. I tell them its ok to score a 0 or 1 the first time, this is brand new… just don’t ever let it happen again. Then give the tools, methods, and strategies to insure they don’t teach that way again.  It has become a method for guiding and individualizing our job-embedded professional development for teachers.

Deia Sanders is a particularly dedicated master teacher and instructional coach. She supports teachers and students at a rural, Title I school in Mississippi with over 90% of students living below the poverty line. 

Mrs. Sanders shares one experience that demonstrates a simple yet dramatic way that job-embedded professional development for teachers can be applied to the classroom.  

She is a mother of two girls--Nyla, 3, and Piper, 18 months.

When Job-Embedded PD Failed...Sort Of

A discussion about job-embedded professional development for teachers and a classroom evaluation experience that I’d rather forget

It’s Jared Heath here, and I can’t believe we haven’t talked about classroom evaluations yet. In a month that focuses on job-embedded professional development for teachers, classroom observations perhaps should have been the first thing to discuss.

Deia Sanders’s blog post this week made me think a lot about classroom evaluations. Classroom evaluations are incredibly helpful—even though I found my own evaluations less than comfortable (as you’re about to read), there was always something to take away.

These days a lot of staff development coaches and other leaders have electronic walkthrough tools like Observation 360. Some schools even use fancy cameras like thereNow to do remote evals with video examples.

Me, I didn’t have that. I had a senior staff member and a piece of paper.

My Classroom Evaluation Experience

With a frame as slight as Henry Fonda’s and a manner perhaps as unassuming as Michael Gough, my staff development director would sit in the back of the room. I don’t even need to close my eyes to see his round glasses standing out in contrast to the deep creases of his 80-year-old face. Mr. “Fonda-Gough” seemed like an intelligently pleasant grandfather. Not like my grandfather, who was a physicist for Boeing and tougher than John Wayne. No, this guy was probably the kind of grandpa that would put you on his knee and slip you candy when your mom isn’t looking.

I was terrified every time he walked through the door. My students knew it.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like looking into the mirror, so to speak. In fact, I would have enjoyed a mirror or a video or something to show what my lesson actually looked like. Even though I knew exactly what it looked like. There are several words to call those observed teaching sessions, most of which are vulgar and none of which I am willing to repeat here.

That poor evaluation form was covered in comments. Mr. Fonda-Gough would bend sentences around corners and bury them in every space he could find. He had a gentleman’s handwriting, one that seemed heavily influenced, though not fully perfected, by his wife’s impeccable penmanship.

After the lesson, he would stand six inches away and squint through his glasses at me. I would always expect an aged voice full of whispers when he spoke, but apparently his voice never aged past his thirty-third birthday. Six inches away so that he could see and with a strong voice that rattled my lungs, he would deliver his assessment. Upon finishing, he would hand me the sheet full of gentleman handwriting, give me a well-practiced smile and “good job,” and leave. That’s when I could breathe again.

But Enough about Me…What About You?

Of course Mr. Fonda-Gough had the best of intentions, and he did the best that could with the tools that we had. But after reading Deia Sanders’s post, I couldn’t help but wish that I had had more actionable strategies. I’m not sure that we needed the fun technology—but maybe it would have been a blessing.

How do classroom evaluations go for you? Have you found a more successful method? What do you really want out of job-embedded professional development for teachers (whether you’re a teacher or an admin)?