“You are more likely to be hit by lightning than to be released from your job as a teacher for poor performance,” said Rick DuFour yesterday at a Professional Learning Community Conference in Denver.
He went on to vent his frustration with current teacher evaluation policies. DuFour is frustrated that teacher evaluations are limited to subjective criterion that can be easily dismissed by teachers, or challenged by unions. He told a story of his experience as a principal where he worked with a team of common course teachers in his school. The team had established a goal for student achievement and the team met the goal. He asked the individual teachers if they’d like him to add the successfully met goal to their evaluations. All said yes.
His point was that principals should not evaluate teachers as individuals but as teams. If a teacher is struggling to meet the team achievement goal the team can respond, and will respond because it impacts all of the teachers on the team. The evaluation of the individual teacher relies on his/her response to the poor performance of his/her students.
Currently, supervisors evaluate teachers on what they should be doing in the classroom based on best practices. Are the daily objectives listed on the white board? Is the teacher using proper questioning strategies? How is the teacher moving around the room? All of these are good strategies, which should lead to positive academic results. But do they?
What if the supervisor met with a team of English 9 teachers who established a goal based on past student performance. The team identifies specific strategies to implement in their classrooms to meet the goal. The supervisor observes the teachers using the specific practices. The supervisor has specific actions to monitor that the teacher has committed to using. Student data is used in the evaluation of the teacher. But not after the fact. It is used to identify areas of deficiencies in student learning that the teams can address. At some point it may come down to dealing with teachers who refuse to commit to the team strategies and are therefore being unprofessional and insubordinate.
Fire them!
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Mark, why do we have teachers? Is it a jobs program for people who like kids? Is it simply to give kids somewhere to go so their parents don’t have to watch them?
Hopefully we have teachers because they can help kids learn. Can we measure that learning (and I’ll even concur that no measurement will be perfect)? If so, why would we not evaluate individual teachers on the central focus of the effort, which is to help kids learn? If one teaches independently, why would you not be evaluated independently?
DuFour has been reading too much of Liz Cohen’s classroom groupwork strategies and misapplying to good employment practice. Having said that, there should be some evaluation component tied to a teaching team assuming the school is designed for teams.
All schools should be designed for teams working in professional learning communitites. The research is crystal clear on their effectiveness. Look it up. The problem continues to be bridging the Knowing Doing Gap (see Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton). They ask “Why does knowledge of what needs to be done so frequently fail to result in action or behavior that is consistent with that knowledge?”
Alex, teachers should not be independent contractors sharing a common parking lot. This does not work and it is based on the old paradigm of ranking and sorting students. It is also based on the old paradigm that teachers teach and students learn.
All of this means we need a cultural change in education. We need to challenge beliefs and behavior that maintain the staus quo. I believe we can reform the institution of education. If we don’t and we continue to put good people in a bad system, the system will win every time.
Of course they are not independent contractors, and they should both work as teams and part of any performance-based compensation (imho) should be team-based, but if a teacher spends 70-85% of their time (and probably 90%+ of classroom time) working by themselves, any evaluation needs to acknowledge this and incorporate it. One of the most fundamental analysis one should pursue is why some teachers on teams are more effective than others? How do you answer that without individual evaluation?
I don’t know how many analogies one could line up here of skilled professionals who both work as a team and are evaluated independently (sports, construction, management consulting, lawyers, medicine, etc etc ad nauseam). I continue to be absolutely baffled by the insistence of teachers not to allow individual evaluation (particularly at the same time the rightly ask to be recognized more as professionals). Calling for “cultural change” while refusing to bring the teaching workforce into the late 20th century is beyond me.
If there are more successful teachers working on a team you then have the opportunity to learn from them. If a succesful strategy is ignored to the continued detriment of student achievement then that teacher should be fired.
I support the use of student data in the evaluations of teachers (I realize I am in the minority with regards to this). But if this is the sole means of evaluation and you continue to maintain the isolated walls of teachers you will continue to see huge disparities in learning. Teachers need to be evaluated as individuals whom are working on teams. This is a different means of evaluation.
What Alexander said. And, a teacher who does not follow the team is not necessarily being insubordinate. Could be, that teacher knows better than the team. High-stakes team-playing as a rule of work can also create resentments and foster mistrust. Better to use teamwork in situations where it is likely to be more effective and in other situations, trust and promote the professionalism of the classroom teacher in situ.
We also need to take a serious look at the evaluator. If the evaluator has no classroom experience, is unable to comprehend classroom practices and is following their check lists, without the background or experience necessary to comprehend what they are seeing…then any evaluation is a waste.
The myth of the all-knowing-administrator needs to be disintegrated before we can honestly evaluate teachers.
What Esther is saying sounds perilously close to the idea that only teachers (including former teachers) should be allowed to evaluate other teachers. This is an often-repeated sentiment that permeates education, much to its isolation and detriment. Since I am not a politician, should I not vote? Should we only seek medical referrals from other doctors? Accept all news without question as we are not professional journalists?
To take this idea to it’s logical end, should we withold all judgement on people with whom we do not share personal experience? Should women not be able to evaluate men? Latino’s not qualified to judge anyone but other latinos? Is the worst teacher better qualified to evaluate other teachers than the best non-teacher?
Obviously evaluators need to be qualified, but as with so many areas, there is no single experience that trumps all others, and quality evaluations (like quality teaching) can come from people with a wide variety of diverse backgrounds.
Mark, you are chasing straw men. No one is arguing that student data (particularly without context) should be the sole means of evaluation. Neither is anyone arguing for “isolated walls” for teachers.
The belief is that individual assessment of teachers — including (but not limited to) student test scores — is both valid and useful, and should be incorporated into a broader evaluation.
And I’m interested, if the “old paradigm(s)” are “ranking and sorting students” and that “teachers teach and students learn,” what is the new paradigm? I continue to see educational and professional systems (college, professional school, medicine, law etc) where students are ranked and sorted for admissions and qualification — and not everybody makes it. Likewise I still think most students (especially post secondary) go to educational institutions to learn. Are these no longer true under the new paradigm?
The new paradigm is that all students can learn.
Yes, students go to post secondary institutions to learn. Yes, not everyone makes it. But based on what criterion? ACT scores? These are used to rank students so colleges can estimate student success compared to other students. ACT tests are norm-referenced. Norm-referencing students ensures that students are placed into predetermined categories. Students are not categorized based on what they know, rather than what they know compared to other students. I am not saying that ranking and sorting should not be used in education. But it should not be the be means by which we operate.
I teach you learn is based on teacher intentions and not student outcomes. (Our teacher compensation, by the way, is mostly based on this.) The old paradigm said that instruction is a constant, as well as time, with learning being variable. The new paradigm says that instruction and time should be variables and learning the constant. This approach keeps education professionals from looking at the student as “faulty” versus their instruction or amount of time dedicated to students’ learning.
This is a rather rambling and incoherant response which might be better handled in a separate blog.
Come on now, Alex. It seems to me Esther is stating an obvious but sometimes under-appreciated point. Personally, I’d rather have rocket-scientists evaluate the design and building of an Atlas rocket than myself. At scientific conferences I have attended, the critiques of colleagues are quite detailed and spare no ego. Similarly, teachers can evaluate each other and from my observations, often do–provided they are encouraged to do so, have some training and will suffer no retribution.
But you know, most folks within the scientific community know that debate and peer evaluation creates good science so long as all are treated professionally. If anything, teachers are not treated in such a manner, sometimes by each other. I think teacher unions are still a necessity but one of their great problems is helping to foster a professional environment and set of expectations similar to the one in which scientists, doctors and even psychologists share with the larger social world.
JJ: I’ll give you the “obvious”, but not the “under-appreciated”. It is an ongoing theme of education reform, echoed on these pages as elsewhere, that many people believe criticism by anyone who has not taught is immediately discredited (as in “If the evaluator has no classroom experience [...] then any evaluation is a waste”.)
Note please that I am not saying teachers should not evaluate other teachers, only that it should not be exclusively so. This is not a technical review on an academic subject.
I read your point to say that scientific professionals are open to vigorous review and debate by other professionals (and it should be noted that much peer review now intentionally includes cross-functional or cross-discipline teams). I agree, and this is why I find the position that classroom experience is an absolute for teacher evaluation terribly myopic.
An interesting twist…and I could use some input. Recently, we have had an issue come up where the school’s Superintendent has pulled students from classes to evaluate the principal and teacher with no parent permission or parent present. What is your take on this?