Joanne Yatvin has been a teacher, principal, superintendent, and literacy expert. In this post, she gives her views on teacher evaluation.
She writes:
“New York Times columnist Joe Nocera recently wrote about a new teacher evaluation system proposed by the Michigan Council for Educator Effectiveness. The system had two central pieces: trained classroom observers who would visit often and give helpful feedback to teachers and student achievement measured by a student’s yearly growth rather than grade level expectations. Unfortunately, the Michigan legislature rejected the proposal, but Nocera hopes that something like it may be picked up by other states or school districts.
“I agree that the proposed system would be an improvement over the systems now used in most states. But it also looks complicated, time consuming and expensive. I believe there is a simpler, more meaningful way to determine teacher effectiveness that could be used everywhere: Ask the students. After all they’ve been with their teachers every day for a whole year and directly felt the effects of their teaching.
“Here’s how this system would work. At the end of the school year, outside their classrooms, students would be given a printed form for rating their teachers. Young children would have questions with three or four answers to choose from. Older students would be expected to write in their own answers. The completed forms would go to principal, who would supplement them with her own classroom observations in order to produce a teacher rating. Later, teachers could read what their students said about them, but with no names attached.
“Below I suggest some questions that I think should be asked, though with different wording for different age levels.
What were the best things you learned at school this year?
How easy was it to understand your teacher’s explanations and questions?
How often did your teacher give you personal attention?
How often did you feel bored or frustrated in class?
Was the amount and type of homework reasonable?
Was the discipline reasonable?
Do you feel prepared for the next grade?
“I think there should probably be a few more questions for older students, but not so many that they stop caring about their responses.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have argued for this approach for a long time.
Student evaluations are problematic. Utah has done them for two years now. Our questions aren’t open-ended, but on the computer, and the kids select “excellent,” “good,” “fair,” etc. There is not a “non applicable,” which is a concern because some of the questions don’t really relate to all classes. The kids are all herded into the computer lab to do the surveys on all of their teachers.
A huge problem is kids with special needs. Our very low special needs kids can’t really do the survey, and the kids with behavioral issues aren’t really trustworthy to be accurate.
I teach junior high and they, in particular, are very moody and somewhat unreliable when it comes to these surveys. Furthermore, the surveys come in December, so the kids aren’t as familiar with the classes as they should be, and classes in the second half of the year aren’t done at all.
These surveys, along with parent surveys, are now 10% of our evaluation. My surveys are fine, but I worry for my colleagues that teach special educations and tough subjects where a lot is expected of kids. Most kids are fair on these evaluations, but as kids realize that their teachers’ jobs depend on these surveys, there’s a real concern that kids may deliberately sabotage teachers.
Why?
I wish all adults could feel the exhilaration of having their livelihood hang in the balance and decided by a capricious teenager or an elementary student who is still chewing on his or her pencil and carrying a stuffed bunny rabbit.
I am sorry that you have such a low opinion of children and teen agers. In my experience as a teacher and a principal, I found the vast majority of students fair-minded and capable of answering the questions I posed honestly.
Students already know they can can “get” teachers by doing poorly on tests whether they like them or not. What about students who don’t care about their classes or have drug problems or who are just angry in general? What weight should their opinions be given?
This is not about having a low opinion of children and teenagers. It’s about giving the power of employment to young people whose personalities are still forming, who most likely will be challenged by these questions. On what basis do they answer these questions?
Consider the following scenarios. How often did your teacher give you personal attention? When a class consists of 40 students and the teacher has no control over THAT variable, and then must teach to a scripted lesson AND meet standards for comprehension and behaviors dictated by those standards, how much personal attention do you believe the teacher will be able to give to each student? And to the satisfaction of each student? And with the teacher’s employment riding on it? You’ve created a system of unreasonable expectations for teachers, on top of those already imposed by the standardized teaching and testing industry.
Or how about the question about homework? How much homework will a student evaluate as reasonable? Considering all of the controversies and conflicted research and practices regarding homework, not to mention school-based controls over homework, how is the teacher to be evaluated on this measure? Is the student–six years old, ten years old, at whatever age they may be–able to evaluate this without bias?
Welcome to consumer-driven educational ideologies 101. Is the teacher entertaining enough? Is the practice of taking away students’ cell phones so that they can concentrate on the lesson at hand a source of contention for students? Are they unhappy that they aren’t able to surf Facebook during class? This will give students yet another reason to assign the teacher a black mark.
It also seems you have not yet had the pleasure of being evaluated by students who decide to evaluate you on your gender, race, or physical appearance. Research shows that these variables do enter into students’ comments and do influence students’ evaluations of teachers.
Most kids are fair to the teachers, but when you deal with surveys where kids know they have responsibility for teachers’ jobs, that’s a huge concern.
No, I’m sorry that you have such a low opinion of teachers. Were you ever a teacher? If so, how long did you teach, and how effective were you? Who rated you a master teacher? What was your specialty, and do you truly believe you have the capacity to instruct other teachers in their subject matter? We live at a time when teachers are required to know a great deal of esoteric material designed for the specially initiated few. How ludicrous , pompous, and arrogant of you to suggest that you know more than the individual teachers. Your position is titular, or at least it should be. I guess your intuition is
worth more than we lowly teachers.
Ian Kay
I don’t think she is expressing a low opinion, but a realistic perspective and a valid concern. Its been my experience as an educator for 25 years that the majority of administrators are naive when it comes to their students.
So how do you control for the popularity contest problem?
If most of the students like the teacher, it is probably because he or she has done a good job of teaching, and the revers is likely to be the result of the teacher’s incompetence. Notice that the questions I’ve suggested don’t ask if students like the teacher but whether or not he or she is teaching well and serving students’ needs.
“If most of the students like the teacher, it is probably because he or she has done a good job of teaching,” [citation needed]
No, not at all. The most popular teachers at my school were the easy ones who were “fun”. Two of the most popular in the building, for instance, had no control over their classes and let kids run wild. One had “movie day” every Friday, and I’m not talking about educational movies, unless “Bride of Reanimator” is more educational than it’s generally given credit for. He also had “lab day” every Tuesday and Thursday, which usually involved starting an alcohol fire on the lab tables, throwing something into it and all of us running to the hall to breathe. The other had kids walking on the tables and poking out the ceiling tiles. We had a class ferret which died by the end of the year – from extreme trauma from the way the students treated her, no doubt. During dissection, kids were throwing body parts around the room.
But you are fine with giving the power to a garbage test or an admin with an axe to grind? I’m a notoriously challenging teacher, but I treat my students with dignity, and a majority of my students like me (and other teachers who have a similar approach). As long as the voices of all students are figured into the evaluation, this strikes me as a far more sensible solution than anything currently in the water. I’d also go one step further and include parent feedback.
Kids dislike unfairness, favoritism, cruelty, neglect, and insensitivity. They don’t dislike tough teachers. Everyone is going to,have a few kids that dislike them; it’s inevitable. But taking your entire cohort into consideration should mute those voices considerably.
Not sure who you’re addressing, Andrew, but not favoring student evaluations of teachers doesn’t mean that one does favor test-based evaluations. Personally, I’d do away with evaluations altogether – a good principal should know when there is a problem and address it accordingly. Other than that, teachers (and all other employees for that matter) should be left alone to teach (or do whatever it is they do) – research shows no performance benefits of annual reviews/evaluations. But if there must be evaluations, there are ways to make it collaborative, peer-based and supportive. But first we need to get past this notion that the “key” to “fixing” education is to fire all the “bad” teachers.
My cohort is 18 six year olds, 3 of whom receive 3X weekly psychitric care for PTSD, 11 of whom are ELLs including one with no English at all, and 3 ESE students. Accomodations for this magically fair multiple choice questionnaire woul be time-consuming and costly so they probably wouldn’t be given in my state/district unless mandated by law.
I guess if it’s more fair for middle and high school teachers with multiple classes then I shoul just eat it, right?
Our Danielson evaluation program already includes a student feedback component but it only kicks in at 3rd grade when students are thought to be capable on independent judgements and able to complete the online survey independently.
In a perfect world, we’d be treated as professionals. But that’s not the world we inhabit. And we won’t anytime soon. Obviously, for someone with a cohort of 18–elementary teachers, generally, student evals would have to have considerably less weight or none at all. I I truly believe that de-coupling standardized tests from evaluations and retention is the linchpin. Teachers could then focus on teaching that kids enjoy instead of drill and kill. That way, teachers could focus on important matters like teaching social justice, advocacy, debate instead of the soul-crushing New Critical “find the metaphor” approach to reading and analysis that current methods require we teach.
None of you have adequately addressed Dienne’s question with any degree of fidelity. As a principal for over a decade, I have seen the popular teachers who were good, the popular teachers who were okay, and the popular teachers who were just bad. I’ve also seen the unpopular good, the unpopular okay, and the unpopular bad. The popularity contest problem is a problem.
Furthermore, it doesn’t matter how you write the questions, it is naive to think that people (children especially) can divorce themselves from the emotional connection of “like” and “dislike” when addressing any degree of quality. It takes a few years to become Vulcan-like and/or wise when pondering the issue of quality. And I know many adults who cannot do that anyway. Think about it this way: As children, did you know you had a good teacher immediately or was it after a few years of reflection? I’ve had both (one time I had what I thought was a good teacher but upon reflection I know realize that she was atrocious). And I had teachers who I thought were bad but it is only with the passage of time that I came to understand that they were not bad but quite good. Sometimes it was just a style that I disliked or a mannerism that bugged me, but their teaching was fine.
I have also been giving out teacher surveys for some time now. They sometimes open doors that I was unaware of as a principal. And it gives students a voice. I would recommend that principals continue to ask for student surveys for those very reasons. However, they also tended to be rather bla-bla for the majority of my staff. And I would be lying if I ever said that I read all of them every year. It is a daunting task when you have over a 900 students.
Andrew is also incorrect. Kids do not always give positive surveys to the challenging teachers. In fact, from my experience it was the opposite. A good, challenging but fair teacher –at least at the secondary level–is more likely to get a mixed bag from student surveys (probably close to the 1/3 rule). Whatever the case, I have not been able to totally remove the popularity contest problem as a variable in the surveys.
This is not a good idea. How can you put the decisions of adults on to children? Children are already crying at exams because they don’t want their teacher to be fired. It isn’t the job of children to worry about the welfare of adults; it is the job of adults to worry about children.
Good point. It’s not any more fair to the kids than it is to the teachers.
I’m all in favor of kids having input, and complaints should definitely be investigated, but kids shouldn’t have the power to be that influential in retaining or firing their teachers.
Notice that the principal is also involved. If he or she is doing the job of observing teachers, the complaints of some disgruntled students won’t fire a teacher, but hopefully, they will make the principal look more often and more carefully at what is happening in the classroom.
If principals agreed to be evaluated the same way by the teachers, staff, parents, and students then there might be some small redeeming quality to this approach.
I doubt it would even be suggested. My district did away with teacher input on principal performance about the same time NCLB came into being and we were suddenly creating all kinds of supervisory and administrative positions that had never existed before and that cost us dearly in terms of classroom resources.
Due respect, writerjoney, but have you met many principals lately? Sure, there are still plenty of decent ones left, but many of them are Broadies or hired by and loyal to Broadies. They’ll simply use the student input however they see fit – if they like the teacher, then, sure, they might take other factors into consideration. But if they don’t, the students’ words will be all it takes.
And there you have it, writerjourney: IF the administration does its job. But that’s the problem. By state law, my administration is supposed to formally observe each staff member three times a year; four, if the teacher is provisional. Much of the staff at my school only got observed once, and a couple were not observed at all. Furthermore, at least once, the principal was seen “observing” a pet teacher of his by setting the timer on his I-Pad (the observations has to be for 20 minutes) and the leaving the pet teacher’s classroom and wandering the halls.
We’ve complained to the district, and nothing gets done. How fairly are we evaluated, and who evaluates the administrators?
To me, making evals more democratic and less subject to the whims of a single petulant and punitive admin is definitely a plus. That and ditching the eval connection with these embarrassingly poor standardized tests.
To quote Buffalo Springfield,
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
Step out of line, the men come and take you away
This is the age we are in by design. When older teachers are targeted because they are close to retirement age, when workers’ rights are quashed, and when evaluation is a game of “gottcha” and falsifying documents to railroad people, you know there is a bigger game at play. This is part of the agenda to destabilize and demoralize teachers to make public schools vulnerable to invading forces.
Yes. I have found standardized student surveys put students in the uncomfortable position of judging a person they respected and viewed as a mentor. Other students angry over a grade or discipline use them as an excuse to trash the teacher. But mostly, a downfall of surveys is the difficulty of obtaining an accurate result due to response bias or the reluctance of students to criticize a person teaching them in the classroom all year.
The best student “survey” is just listening and interacting with students. I find out more from a one on one or through a trusted colleague than a bunch of multiple choice survey questions. Often, there is more to the story in the student’s lives than just “Did the teacher communicate content accurately?”.
“How often did you feel bored in class?” What’s the next question, how often do you feel bored in the world? And who is to blame for that?
How often did you question the usefulness of the district, state, and federally mandated material that your teacher presented in the required and prescribed ways?
Do you agree that it is your teacher’s fault that you were bored even though the teacher has no say about what, how, or when you are taught these things?
Ridiculous.
Student evals as a quid pro quo for ditching tests being used in evaluations would be a big improvement, IMO. But ONLY if….
Definitely want students to be part of evaluations. Should probably include parents as well. But there is not necessarily a relationship between popularity with students & parents (or colleagues) and the quality of student learning.
You haven’t had the “pleasure” of having parent and student surveys count as part of your evaluation then. I have, for two years. And it IS a popularity contest.
You have not taught high school or middle school, or did with eyes closed. Popular teachers are not always, and even rarely, the best. I see some young teachers often try to be “friends” at the level of the students, usually with disastrous results. The students lose respect, especially when conflict inevitably arises. The best teacher in my high school was a no nonsense, unsmiling ELA veteran. Every kid did not like her personally because she made you work and graded with the red pen of reality. No easy A’s in her class which miffed parents, too. The popular teachers mostly taught sciences. I found out later in college, I was able to survive weed-out Composition 101, but was far behind in science.
I unfortunately overheard the conversation of two of my high school students at one former school. They were rating their teachers by who looked the best in jeans and who had the best smile. My own kid’s school lost a great teacher due to a parent posse angry their own kids did not get a leadership role in an extra- curricular activity.
Is this the basis for your favoring of teacher surveys?
This is ridiculous. The writer does not know much about children. Often the least appreciated teacher in grade eight is the one juniors and seniors return to their middle school to thank for the rigor, honesty, and thoroughness of their instruction. In addition, as in any subjective forum, some students would feel compelled to pen a good report regardless.
Adults are responsible for hiring administrators who can do the job, and adults are the administrators. Hold them responsible for following agreed upon norms. And provide enough money to schools so that the job can be done. Therein lies the beginning of any accountability with evaluation.
Why does teacher “evaluation” have to be a humiliating experience that questions the teacher’s professionalism and leaves it up to others, such as ‘principals’ and children to determine how effective we are? Why can’t teachers produce portfolios of their work, videotapes of lessons with self-critiques, be evaluated by panels of their peers, and achieve certifications through testing as conceived by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and based upon what other professions do to evaluate and elevate their members?
I teach primary students and to say that the suggested system in this post would be less than honest and fair and that would be an understatement. Young children are always eager to receive attention and to please. They would be easily manipulated by whomever was administering the instrument into choosing whatever pre-determined answers the administrator wants.
If I had to discipline a student beforehand then rest assured I would receive a negative comment from that child no matter what I had done the other 179 days of the school year or what they had learned because young children act in the moment and are just beginning to develop the ability to think ahead and gain a perspective on time.
The proposed system sounds like little more than a popularity contest and has little to no controls in place for vindictive children, assuming that all students will be honest, fair, and truthful. I had several mentally ill children in my class this year with varying degrees of self-control and major issues with PTSD, violent acting out, and anti-social behaviors.
They all told me on the last day of school that they wanted to be in my class next year and wanted to stay with me this summer but if they are asked, on a bad day, to evaluate me, how would I fare? Not well, I imagine since they were all prone to trashing the classroom physically, screaming curses, marking random answers on district and state assessments to get them over with, and otherwise refusing to cooperate.
Throughout my career I have proven my effectiveness by completing 2 masters degree programs, achieving National Board certification, serving on district committees that created curriculum, assessments, teacher mentoring, lesson planning, classroom management, and grading, to name just a few.
Despite the ridiculousness of VAM and current teacher evaluation fads, many clearly designed as gotchas! and traps, I have achieve “Highly Effective” ratings for the last 4 years. Before that I achieved ‘tenure’ in 2 different school systems through a difficult and lengthy process of repeated ‘observations’ and portfolio completion.
Why do I have to keep proving myself again and again and again?
I have given district-wide, school-wide, and grade-level professional development classes for years and I continue to further my own learning at my own expense and on my own time because the one-size-fits-all, beginning teacher approach to PD my district takes is worthless to me.
While this suggested system sounds more reasonable than the Inquisition methodology listed at the beginning of the article in reality it is at best a tiny snapshot of what a school year involves and is, therefore, quite limited in its fairness and usefulness.
Other professions are able to create and administer evaluation systems that are not sexist, humiliating, demeaning, and disrespectful of the practitioners. Why can’t we? Every system that is proposed, from Linda Darling-Hammonds extremely costly and complicated system to the Danielson rubric nonsense to pointless walk-throughs all assume that teachers must be monitored like animals or small children by grown-ups who no longer actually teach or experience the realities of the classroom themselves, having escaped to more money, more power, and more prestige without having to undergo the humiliations and degradations they propose for their former peers.
I’m glad I’m retiring after next year.
I totally agree.
Chris – fine teachers, such as yourself, are leaving in droves, especially the ones who have reached retirement age (many who might have hung on a little longer in better days). Kudus to you for your contributions to the field.
I agree that asking children to be evaluators would be a foolish idea.
Teacher bashing has to stop, before this policy leads to their extinction.
Ellen #OopsThereGoesAnotherOne
Thanks, flos56! I would love to stay another 12 – 15 years but I’m done with being treated like a stupid, untrustworthy worker bee with no professional autonomy, low pay, daily bullying from power-hungry admins, and other reformist damage.
Life is too show to be a martyr. I can continue to help children and do more when I am whole and healthy and outside of this sick system.
Chris-This will be a pity, if you are driven out by mass stupidity and greed. This is what the evil forces are banking on, and I can’t blame you if you reach the point of no return. The loss will be the students and state of Florida that seems to bask in its own ignorance.
Well stated Chris. I couldn’t agree more.
I don’t think this is a good idea. Students are active participants with specific viewpoints about a teacher which aren’t necessarily based on the teacher’s ability to teach. A student who is getting a low mark due to lack of effort could easily blame his teacher and not accept responsibility for their own actions (or in this case in actions).
And I definitely wouldn’t trust any seventh grader to give a truthful answer.
If we sometimes question a principal’s motivations, how can we rely of children to “do the right thing”?
Ellen #KeepLooking
Vergara anyone?
To anyone who is not familiar with the reference, one of the teachers accused of being “grossly ineffective” by a student testifying in the Vergara trial (Christine McLaughlin) was selected as “Pasadena Teacher o f the year” in 2013.
Student surveys have some value as feedback to teachers but they should not be used in formal teacher evaluations (any more than we should survey kids to evaluate doctors)
The best English teacher I had in high school was despised by most of the students who had her because she covered your papers with red ink and made you rewrite them many times.
Completely agree. Student surveys, especially at the secondary level, can offer feedback that is sometimes useful for the teacher. However, the teacher should develop the survey to cover the questions that they want feedback on as an individual educator. A blanket survey as part of the formal evaluation system invites manipulation, favor-seeking, and a lack of fairness to the teacher.
I used to survey my students (HS Spanish) at the end of the year. I adjusted some things over the years but after a while they can become quite repetitive. The students could do them anonymously or put their name to it. Generally they liked doing them. But it was never part of the formal evaluation and student comments shouldn’t be.
It is up to the administrators to evaluate with the teacher what the teacher is doing. It should be an ongoing collaborative dialogue and yes it will take the admin’s time but what the hell are they for if not for handling student discipline and teacher evals??
These “rubrics” and drive by shootings, oops I mean drive by evals are so invalid as to be a poor joke.
I do something similar, Duane, with my primary students. We spend the last week of school preparing a book for their next year’s teacher, showcasing what they have learned, what they can do, and what they need to keep working on to grow as learners. On my dining room table right now I have cards from students given to me on the last day of school thanking me for being their teacher and ‘putting up’ with their problems all year, signed by their parents as well.
We have numerous class meetings where we review what worked well and what was problematic, a practice which we followed throughout the school year to solve problems and build cohesion in our classroom family.
Yes, most children will be candid and truthful when they have been treated with respect and their dignity is intact but, as I said in my longer comment above, every year we get more and more mentally ill children in our Title I classrooms, children damaged, abused, neglected, frightened, hungry, sick, withdrawn, and otherwise in need of love, care, and structure.
I do what I can for the few hours I have them each week and I have many come back and thank me, sometimes years later, for making them feel safe and loved but they also acknowledge that they acted out more because they had no where else to get rid of their anger and frustration. Should these children be allowed to evaluate my 20 years of teaching with a short, multiple choice questionnaire?
To answer your question: Only if you offer them chocolate beforehand. There is a study done by two professors of the effects of offering chocolate to students before they evaluate teachers. Teachers who gave chocolate to students got higher ratings.
That’s why I keep a treasure chest with treats in my filing cabinet, LOL.
Is there anything chocolate can’t do?
(to paraphrase Homer Simpson)
100 dollar bills might work even better.
Not on MY salary, LOL!
Good to know about the chocolate, Duane. If you have a link to the study, I will be sharing it with my faculty, so that we ALL give out chocolate before the student surveys are done.
I think principals should rise from the rank of having been classroom teachers for many years (no more Broad quickie turn-around principals). And I think that a school principal instead of being forced to bury his/her head in data and useless paperwork should “patrol the beat” and walk around the school, stop in classrooms… yes actually get to know the teachers and students and see them in action. Principals no longer know teachers by actually seeing them in action. They “know” teachers by corporate jargon like canned self assessment forms, Charlotte Danielson, boiler plate surveys sent by anonymous administrators and the likes. Wow, how radical! If a principal has any question as to a teacher’s ability… how about peer review? In fact to keep it apolitical and honest, peer reviews could be done by pairing schools and having teams of teachers go to the other school when needed. They would have time in my “education world” because teachers would no longer spend the majority of their day on paperwork to appease bureaucrats far removed from the classroom. They also would not be collecting useless data on their students or wasting time posting objectives that look like hacker encryptions instead of plain English!! Having students nearly totally responsible for teacher evaluations is a ridiculous concept. Sure, having them fill out a survey AND IN THEIR OWN WORDS (not canned fill in the blanks) like an exit ticket would be great. The quiet student a teacher failed to notice all year who comments about this will awaken a teacher to this weakness. A student who writes about hating a class because the teacher is really mean all the time… what does this actually indicate? Is it because the teacher wants the student to do their homework? Or is it because the teacher has a cold manner in the classroom? A principal worth his/her weight is going to have a better understanding because he or she is constantly circulating in the school.
Exactly. My at-risk junior high school is losing teachers right and left because our new principal won’t engage with the faculty or community. The previous principals did, and so we know what it’s like to have a principal that knows the kids and teachers by name. This new principal once asked me what room I was in. In April. Seven months of school and he didn’t know what classroom. My faculty has 40 teachers.
I believe that I work in the same district as you. I get to be observed by my assistant principal and principal. There is a definite interrelator reliability issue with the observations. The district denies this. If the evaluation is used as a conversation starter about best practice, then I am okay. However if it is used as a gotcha, it is useless. Sorry your administrator is problematic. I had a new administrator this year she was fabulous. Even so, we lost 1/3 of our staff at our title one elementary school. They all jumped out of title one. They were tired of dealing with appalling student behaviors. The conversation is about student surveys. My survey last year was better than the district average, but I really have to ask, did the children even understand the questions? It bothers me that six year olds get to decide what good teaching is. How would they have a clue? They only know if I am mean or nice. The questions posed on this survey are way above first grader’s heads. I have no idea how the parent survey went, I only had one parent respond. This was too few to give a score. This made me question if the parents really believe that this was important. I am very irritated by Vam. On interim tests my proficiency score was 80%. My ending score was 72%. Did they take into account that my top four students moved between March and April? It bothers me that I can’ the plain how the score is configured. This whole evaluation system is out of whack.
I do think we’re in the same district, too. And yes, inter-rater reliability is a HUGE problem. We’ve seen a lot of that at my school. And, of course, it depends on if the teacher likes you or not. If they like you, you’re golden. If they don’t, your hosed. And the administrator evaluating changes from year to year, so there’s no consistency. And I HATE that the district denies our concerns about playing favorites. It was SO obvious at my school this year, and yet no one will stop the problems.
Even our uneven our union president is in denial. He thinks our evaluation system is the best in our state.
My son informed me that some students of mine he had met where he lived thought I was “mean.” They were second language students and what I later learned was that “mean” actually meant “strict.” Might be hard to communicate a teacher’s value via a survey.
Back in the nineties, before NCLB, my district allowed tenured staff in good standing with ten years of service to choose an alternative form of evaluation. Colleagues worked together to observe each other while working on a particular goal, and some formed study groups. These plans were often a lot more work than the traditional route. Since teaching is very isolating, it fostered collegiality, self reflection and improvement. It also got people out of ruts and their comfort zones. This model actually allowed teachers to grow more than the traditional administrator overseer model. Then, NCLB was inflicted on the schools, and the district went back to top down observation.
We had a similar program in place, with teacher learning communities that met monthly at a district level and then a the school level to share what was learned.
We worked, as a grade level team, on lesson planning and delivery together and we visited each other’s classrooms frequently, observing lessons being taught and focusing on the teaching and student learning rather than the teacher and evaluating him/her. We all grew and our students benefitted greatly.
Then we got a new superintendent, a Broadie-trained ex-miliary non-teacher who scrapped it all and replaced it with highly-paid business consultants, also without teaching experience.
Our district dwindled in to chaos in a few months and masses of teachers retired or quit after the superintendent fired almost 200 experienced educators as part of the disruption strategy.
That superintendent then left abruptly and now we are on the third superintendent in 4 years but the state has cut our funding so deeply and the people in charge of the program I described were all let go so I have no hope of it being revived.
Instead we have a disastrous Danielson evaluation process that many principals abused and deviated from the agreed-upon process and the whole thing is just one big, heartbreakingly sad mess where it once was a thing of hope and beauty.
Behold, REFORM!
Sounds like a wonderful collaborative model (the learning communities). A shame it did not continue.
Wow, that approach must’ve gotten faculty buy-in. After ten years of the submit lesson plan/observed class/post-observation checklist meeting routine (which tends to be artificial), teachers would have meaningful opportunities.
It was great! The assistant superintendent who created it turned a high school from a D to an A and he believed that empowering teachers was the key to success. He put in place so many great programs.
Then it all fell down when we had a budget deficit and he and all the people he put in place were gone overnight.
It made a hard job even harder and less appealing to lose that wonderful approach!
I still had to turn in plans to the principal on a rotating basis of once a month, and we also had informal visits from administrators. However, it was a model that focused on growth without distilling everything down to a metric. Our evaluation was in narrative form within categories. We were a relatively small district, and the principal knew who was working hard and who was coasting.
My school became a “Blue Ribbon” school which I think had a lot to do with the teachers taking more ownership of their growth through this approach to evaluation because it is respectful of teaching as a profession. Also, since the teachers were used to collaborating, many of us worked on the rigorous application process voluntarily.
We need more of the approaches RT and CiF describe yet we’re getting less. Spectacular teachers who reach kids wouldn’t necessarily hit all 20+ categories on a Danielson checklist in a worthwhile lesson.
I admire teachers who keep giving their best to youths each day. Hope you have a refreshing, fulfilling summer.
Maybe we should have kids determining which doctors are good and even which get to keep their medical license, eh?
Yes/no questions are usually not helpful, unless a request/demand for elaboration/explanation is included. Teens can be very terse.
The Gates Foundation has the tripod survey, so why is it a bad idea coming from them?
Eliciting feedback from students, parents, or fellow teachers doesn’t seem like a bad idea. How to do it objectively? That seems just as fraught with peril as using test scores.
Every profession have people who do not do a good job. Honestly, I believe there are many, many more excellent teachers than bad teachers. Teachers give unconditionally to their students. Sadly, everyone has been thrown into the same pot, and teachers are viewed as shysters who cannot be trusted to earn an honest paycheck. I have completed 30 years of teaching, and I suffer with the lowest professional self esteem I have ever had. In 2 years I will close my classroom door for the last time, wave bye to my students, walk to my car, and drive away. I will never look back. My dream, with God’s help, is to find myself again . . . I want to find that girl who was happy and whole before the toxic trends of education took her hope away. My family reassured me that I will find that “girl” again. Meanwhile, the deformers win . . . because who in their right mind would go into a profession which strips you of your dignity?
Dear Sad Teacher, I hope that you start to find yourself again this summer–not waiting two years. Immerse yourself in gratifying interests while you’re not deluged by the time demands of the school year.
When you return for fall term, shave a little off the time you devote (there are other teachers who coach/tutor/run side businesses who spend fewer hours). Your students are entitled to a teacher w peace of mind.
Please, pick a new name to post by (self-fulfilling prophecy and all that). Wishing you joy for summer and your final two years.
Sad Teacher,
Spend time this summer doing something for you and taking care of yourself. Then, when school starts back up, find time outside of school to do something for yourself each week. Yoga got me down from the window ledge last summer after the worst year in the classroom that I’ve ever had. After I’d calmed down some, I made a list of all the things I’d miss if I didn’t go back to teaching this past fall. There were too many things that I would have missed to not give it a try. I took it one day at a time,, sneaked in somethings that I wanted to do that involved real teaching and real learning, kept up with my once a week one hour yoga class and made sure that I had some me time on the weekends. This past year won’t go down as one of my favorites, but it was a good year. I made it! You can, too!
I understand the fears of many responders who think i have proposed a bad plan for teacher evaluation. But, have they considered that the principal is involved in evaluating teachers at the same time as students, and is certainly not going to fire a teacher just because some students don’t like her. One thing my plan would accomplish, would be to have principals look more closely at a teacher if students’ views differed strongly from his or hers.
In seeing so many negative responses, I recognize that I may not have posed good questions. What I was trying to get at were students’ views of the things that happened in their classroom every day, all year long, not whether or not they liked their teacher. A principal or another evaluator who makes only a couple of–usually, pre-announced–classroom observation is more likely to be fooled than students.
I’m sure you were a trustworthy principal and hired the same but many now are not trustworthy and as a union representative I deal all the time with teacher grievances regarding unfair evaluations where the administrator falsified entries, entered them under a false date and time, misreported which lesson was observed, etc.
We almost alwaupys win concessions from the district in these cases. I’ll cut some slack for being overworked but far too many of these administrators are in it for the power over others in these disruption districts and they are not experienced enough nor qualified to evaluate teachers.
We are talking about a state where 2 poor evaluations results in permanent loss of teaching certificate and the impossibility of ever teaching at a public school again, nullyfying expensive colllege degrees and possibly years of personal investment. it is far more high stakes now than it was, perhaps, when you were actively involved in traching or supervising.
Teachers are simply protecting themselves from unfair and capricious career destruction.
In the hands of a fair and knowledgeable principal, student input can certainly be handed in a fair and reasonable manner. But then, in the hands of a fair principal, any sort of input or no outside input at all can and will be handled in a fair and reasonable manner. A good principal knows his/her teachers and will treat them decently and respectfully.
The problem is with the many (and growing?) numbers of principals who are neither fair nor reasonable. Just like test scores can be gamed and used to suit the principals’ desires, so can student input. Education “reform” for the past dozen or more years has been all about “teacher proofing” the classroom, but what’s really needed in so many cases is “principal proofing” the teacher.
Wow. I’m amazed that you didn’t meet awful principals throughout your career. In 14 years of teaching, I have had 6 principals. Three have been excellent. The other three have been awful. One micromanaged us to death, one was a sexual harasser, and the other wanted the title but didn’t want to do any work.
And principals get teachers fired for a number of reasons, including race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. I’ve seen all of these happen. And the surveys that students do are totally popularity contests, I hate to tell you.
“But, have they considered that the principal is involved in evaluating teachers at the same time as students, and is certainly not going to fire a teacher just because some students don’t like her.” [needs citation]
Okay, it’s probably unlikely that principal would fire a teacher *just* for that, but a teacher that they already don’t like? It’s just more ammo in the firing cannon.
Too simplistic and naive even as a supplement.
I think one of the problems is that there is now a witch-hunt atmosphere in the teaching profession. Teachers have too little control over their career as it is. No matter what the suggestion to “improve” teaching might be, teachers are going to be fearful and skeptical and rightly so.
Honestly, I do not even think there is an answer anymore. All of these toxic evaluation rubrics inspired by Danielson and Marzano are designed to lower teacher self esteem, especially the self esteem of older teachers. But, like I’ve said before, everyone turns 50 sooner or later. This plan of entering student evaluations into the mix of PARCC results adds discouragement onto an already discouraging system. This gives students total reign over an already exhausted teacher. We have students rushing through a PARCC test in 30 minutes because a low score means nothing to them. The student will not earn a low grade or be retained. There are no consequences for the student. After the student finishes the PARCC in record time, this system would allow them to then write anything down about that teacher. Do you think a student will write good things down about a teacher who had to discipline them regularly and keep them in from recess for repeatedly not doing a ten minute homework assignment? I’m sure they will write glowing comments about that teacher. The sad thing is that teacher will probably be one of the best teachers that child ever had. The sad truth is that eventually there will be fewer and fewer teachers to beat up on. Who will be teaching our kids then?
20 somethings never turn 50. Just ask them.
“Shock and Awe”
When teachers are all gone
The bots will teach the children
Shock them when they’re wrong
Like Dr. Stanley Milgram
I have used my own student surveys with questions relevant to my classroom until our state required surveys as part of teacher evaluations. Unfortunately, as with any top-down mandate from people outside a classroom, the state survey questions are think-tank derived, vague, and completely useless to improve my skills. The questions have difficult language and confuse students. So, rather than innovation and improvement, I now deal with yet more irrelevance imposed by the state.
Exactly. I have the kids write an end of the year evaluation of me, and I feel that I get good evaluations from them, but the state-required one that all students do gives me no nuance.
If students know they are doing the eval FOR you, that’s a whole other thing right there.
Exactly. I tell the kids that I don’t care what they write, but that their suggestions go into how I teach the next year. And so the kids give me good suggestions.
The point being, we don’t need to score and rank every public servant in the world. What are the scores for every firefighter, parks dept. worker, US gov employee, how do all the enlisted people in the military rate against each other on a scored rubric? This is a ridiculous way to manage people and a waste of time and money.
This.
Well pounded. Hope the keyboard survived.
Maybe, if the students were questioned such that the responses could be part of an ongoing conversation about what the students perceive versus what the teacher intended and how the teacher adjusted and/or predicted for those perceptions and reactions later on and so on. The students would have to be convinced that it is not something they can game, otherwise it’s garbage in . . .
Maybe.
Maybe.
TC…Yes.
What you said, TC. Well put!
This is the enormous elephant in the room. The K to 12 school experience is much much much larger than the sum of its parts.
The reform movement is overly focused on each tree while overlooking the forest. There isn’t a person alive that did not experience a range of teaching abilities as a student. We all have stories about the confusing, the lazy, the inappropriate, the oblivious, the boring, the mediocre, the funny, the interesting, the creative, the exceptional, and the exceptionally bad teachers. Looking back on it, I don’t think I would have wanted it any other way.
A little bragging seams appropriate at this point. For 13 years I was principal of a Madison, Wisconsin elementary school. In 1985 my staff nominated me for Elementary Principal of the Year (without my knowledge) and I won the award. Later on, I was superintendent-principal of a small rural school district in Oregon for 12 years. Although we had about half our students on free or reduced lunches, our test scores were always above the state average. When I retired my School Board gave me a silver necklace with a bell and a tag on it. The tag said, “When the bell rings, remember.”
What I remember from my years of teaching (at grades 1,3, 5,6,7,8, 9, 11, 12) and being a principal was the satisfaction of working students and teachers. I retired early because the state ruled that all K-8 districts must merge with their high school district. Right after that happened, the Asst. spt. of the High School district visited me and told me that I should be spending more time supervising kids on the playground. I “quit” the following day.
And this keeps your idea about students evaluating teachers from being a bad one how, exactly?
writerjoney,
During your 25 years in principal/superintendent roles, did you mandate student surveys for your faculty?
We’ve seen here Chris in Florida and Duane Swacker’s professional choices to elicit student feedback. Maybe student surveys are best used at teacher’s discretion.
A savvy educator could create a free website with customizable question bank for specific grade spans, subjects that teachers could access.
As a lifelong learner, I can rate a car mechanic’s ability to explain a problem or his/her courtesy but I can’t assess the mechanic’s technical prowess. So why expect a youngster to evaluate a teacher?
Thanks for provoking many comments & insights from Dr Ravitch’s readers.
I always have the kids do an anonymous eval on me – I have several different types from which to choose, but I would never want their comments to be part of my formal evaluation (even if they are good!)… sorry, but there are just too many people who think they know how we should be teaching just because they were students – now we’re thinking of allowing children to vocalize their thought on this – how is this professional? Do doctors, lawyers, or even tradesmen do this?
I meant to say “working with” students and teachers.
Diane,
Surely this is a joke. If it isn’t, it is evidence of the kind of arrogance and pomposity that exists in the ranks of educational administrators. How would she like it if teachers were given the same opportunity to rank her effectiveness as an administrator. Of course she would be given an opportunity to read the comments, with no names of course. Perhaps the staff could share their thoughts with the community too, no names of course.
Please.
Ian
It’s state law in Utah that part of teacher evaluations are by parent and student surveys. The problem is that most parents won’t do the surveys, so they aren’t statistically valid. And student surveys have a lot of issues, too, depending on age, etc. I’ve never met a teacher that liked these surveys.
I think that what you propose is a good idea. It would have helped me to be a better principal and be more sensitive to teachers’ needs and feelings. If a large number of teachers thought I was incompetent or unfair, the district superintendent should have investigated and, possibly, fired me.
I think this approach might work as one facet of an assessment. One thing required of all responses, though, should be a “why” component. For example– Q: How often did your teacher give you personal attention? A: About once a week. Q: Why? A: Because there were 23 students in the class and the class was only 43 minutes long.
Thought along that line.
Asking too much from students; they may see everything every day, but they are hardly trained supervisors. And it may be seen by some as begging for in-depth descriptions and justifications of incompetence or poor performance or Ill fits from their pov.
Ohio has offered districts the option of a student survey that can count for 15% of a teacher’s evaluation. The State Department of Education puts out a request for bid and “vets” submissions–at least in theory–for reliability and validity. I just looked at the form that the vendors have to fill out. Pathetic little on reliability and even worse on validity. Validity means nothing more than a correlation with VAM. Example of what gets an ODE approval
“My Student Survey LLC was developed by Vanderbilt University Peabody School of Education following an established validation framework that uses multiple sources of evidence to establish construct validity (Messick, 1989). Several steps were taken, such as conducting student cognitive interviews, to develop the STeP survey that other providers of student surveys did not perform. This strong research-based foundation is why the STeP survey has the highest correlation with student achievement of any publicly reported data on student surveys with a .2964 correlation with value-added student gains in math and a .4988 correlation with value-added student gains in ELA. In other words, you will learn more about your teacher’s ability to impact students achievement by administering the STeP survey than any other student survey available. In other words, you will STeP survey than any other student survey available. The survey consists of 49 questions that measures the frequency of teacher actions on a scale of always to never, which is a more accurate way to ask students requiring a lower-inference threshold for students to consider and evaluate than when using a response scale of agree/disagree.
Well I am thrilled to see that ODE likes “conducting student cognitive interviews” to establish validity, and thinks low correlations with VAM in two subjects makes this product suitable ( two forms) grades 3 to 12 for ALL subjects.
For K-12 the only approved survey comes from Panorama The vendor claims it is reliable, developed in Partnership with Harvard University treating seven areas of educator performance that have been proven to impact student outcomes: valuing of the subject matter, teacher press, learning strategies, teacher personal interest in students, student engagement, classroom climate, and pedagogical effectiveness. This survey was developed by economist Ron Ferguson. It was piloted in the infamous “Measures of Effective Teacher” project funded at $64 million by the Gates Foundation, and has no validity other than low correlations with VAM. I looked at this survey in detail. It will give you a high score if you routinely give homework and check it, comply with preferred teaching strategies not far removed from direct instruction (both related to “teacher press”), and so on. A 2012 contract for Tripod student survey in one district was priced at about $4.25 per student. You might be able to download PDF copies of the original surveys used in the MET project at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/34345.
I think Ohio gets an F for even accepting the information supplied by the vendors. I think that the surveys approved by Ohio are totally inappropriate for K-12 and for every subject. One size does not fit all. I am especially adamant about this because all of this hoopla about teacher effectiveness is concentrated on ” data” from just a few subjects and a few grades–convenience samples, not full spectrum thinking about the work of teachers.
I am also thrust into thinking that student ratings of parent effectiveness and legislator’s savvy about the real work of teachers might be interesting–and publish those ratings in the paper– all in the interest of “transparency” of course. I am out of here. My sarcasm bug just bit me big time.
Now that you’ve mentioned it, I don’t think I’ve even SEEN anything on the validity of the surveys required for Utah teachers. I’m going to have to ask around on that.
This kind of subjective open-ended survey would be a very hard measurement of teacher effectiveness. Sometimes students don’t appreciate or understand the true value of instruction they have received until many years after the fact. Education is not a business that can be evaluated solely by its consumers as if it’s a ham sandwich at the deli.