My administration went over the new evaluation model that the state of Tennessee will be using to judge teacher effectiveness with the faculty today.
To our faculty's credit, we all took the news pretty calmly -- at least in the meeting. After having such an intense previous year, I think we're all a little harder to rattle. We all sat in the cafeteria as the new process of formal/informal evaluations, post-conference meetings, summative meetings, and evaluation rubrics was set before us. Honestly, up to this point I was feeling pretty hopeful. After all, nothing our vice principal said we would be evaluated on was something I hadn't attempted before or was averse to trying. Sure, the 15-minute observation (which could occur at any point in the lesson) sounded a little dicey, but how many times could any good teacher have the bad luck to have an evaluator walk in on a seat-work day? Somehow, with enough effort and a little empathy on all sides, we would make it work.
Then, we watched a video of a teacher going through a 45-minute geometry lesson, and were asked to evaluate it based on the lesson-plan rubric. The lesson wasn't great, but to a new-ish teacher like myself (and most of the people I talked to) the teacher in the video seemed to be doing a decent job. He asked lots of questions, kept the kids engaged through the whole lesson, and used some slick-looking technology to get his message across. My group came up with a little over a "3" average for the lesson, on a scale of 5. Keep in mind that to get and keep tenure, a teacher has to consistently score 4's and 5's on his/her evaluations. Our principal asked us to share our answers, then told us that the national evaluators gave the teacher a 2.7. Not even an "acceptable" score for a lesson that in many respects I thought was effective. We were told that a score of "5" meant that there was no room for improvement, which must mean that the odds of getting a 5 on your evaluation are about on par with being named "Teacher of the Year" and winning "American Idol" all in the same voting period.
Now I'm starting to wonder if we as teachers are being asked to play a rigged game, to throw balls into a basket half a mile away. Why even put "5" on the evaluation model if we're all human, and capable of improvement? With half of our yearly evaluations coming from student scores -- kids whose home-lives, choices, and hormones are all so far out of our control, I believe the next biggest portion of our overall evaluation are these observations. Having tenure means that before a teacher can be fired, they are guaranteed a hearing of their case -- no more, no less. It bothers me a little that tenure is fading away, but what bothers me most is that lawmakers are trying to make teachers look like we aren't good enough to deserve it.
