Evaluation Day

So today was my evaluation conference. This is the time when you go into a room with your appraiser and have a talk with them about what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. Overall this process has gone great for me over the past few years. I would like to share with you how I am evaluated and how that compares to my corporate evaluations that I received.

  Educational evaluations all come down to classroom time. The more time that an evaluator is in the classroom with you the better idea that they have of how well you do. The minimum time that they can be in your room is 45 minutes, and mostly this is what you get. Every evaluators goal that is serious about the process promises quite a few walk throughs. Your evaluator is an administrator. This is the only thing that I find weird as I would like an experienced teacher to come evaluate me and tell me what I can do to improve myself. In as evaluation, you are rated as unacceptable, below expectations, proficient, and exceeds expectations in many categories. The main point is how well do your kids respond to you, and do you enable them to learn or are you a talker that moves right past them. I scored well in every different category, and was told that a criticisms was that I was to intellectual and sometimes went over the kids head with what I knew. This I took as a compliment. The process is completed on paper and then we have a meeting where things can be addressed before everyone signs on the dotted line. This entire process is very similar to my last job. The difference is that instead of a complete jerk evaluating me that had no idea about what I did, or did not do. I have an administrator that has actually sat in with me on my job. This works great if your administrator is good with the process. However, it falls apart if the person just does not take it seriously.

I can think of several different administrators at my school alone that look at it as a menace. This is something that they have to do to get their paycheck. Some teachers also view it this way, so a lot of imaginary evaluating goes on. As a professional I am really irritated by that, and work really hard to make sure that I have done my job, so I ask for people to do theirs and help me to be better. Perhaps that is a new teacher that is naive in the ways of the world, but for me as a professional it is nice to have an evaluator that actually cares. I think part of what is going to help save education is a focus on professionalism. A focus on trying to make ourselves better at our jobs. Whether that is in content knowledge, or classroom strategies we all can benefit in a little criticism. I say this as a person that does not take criticism well. I understand the need for it, and really think that if we are going to be successful as educators we have to look at this process as a way to better ourselves. Administrators have a part in this as well. If they are not serious we run the risk of having serious problems in the classroom, while on paper our teachers look great.

Until Tomorrow,

Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) English critic