I always appreciate Larry Ferlazzo’s reflections. Here, he shares his student evaluations as well as other resources about having your students evaluate you or evaluating yourself as a teacher. Even if you have already ended this school year, this may give you ideas for next year. I’m always interested in seeing what kinds of questions other teachers ask their students in teacher evaluation surveys.

17 June 20 Permalink

This conference, one of hundreds underway across the District, offers a rare glimpse into the hypersensitive center of an education reform movement that has taken aim squarely at teachers.

The idea, aggressively embraced by the Obama administration, is as straightforward as it is controversial: that teachers are the main factor in student growth - more than poverty, parents, curriculum, principals or other circumstance. Improve the quality of instruction, the logic goes, and you will improve the public schools, a conviction that has led districts to adopt more-rigorous ways of evaluating teachers.

The District’s system-called IMPACT, now in its second year-is becoming a national model, even as unions and some experts question the wisdom of staking careers on it. Last year, then-Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee fired 75 teachers who received poor evaluations. Firing a teacher was a rarity under the old system, which tended to rate teachers highly even as the city’s schools accrued one of the nation’s worst academic records.

Under the new system, the annual rating for teachers in certain grades depends heavily on how much their students’ test scores improve, a metric that many experts consider unreliable.

But the heart of the new system is a set of nine standards - from explaining content clearly to time management - that are supposed to represent years of research on the elements of great instruction. During five, half-hour classroom observations throughout the year, most unannounced, principals or master educators assess how well teachers incorporate the standards into their teaching

After each observation, there is a conference. It’s the moment when the reform agenda meets the teachers expected to carry it out, when teachers so often praised in emotional or even artistic terms - for effort, devotion, creativity-confront a new, more technical set of measures.

This is a pretty lengthy article, but worth a read. Unlike most teacher evaluation articles floating around right now, it’s not radically written. For the most part, it allows us to look into the evaluation system and create our own opinions.

18 March 6 Permalink

The Lab School has selective admissions, and Ms. Isaacson’s students have excelled. Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3’s or 4’s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High School of Science, the city’s most competitive high schools.

“Definitely one of a kind,” said Isabelle St. Clair, now a sophomore at Bard, another selective high school. “I’ve had lots of good teachers, but she stood out — I learned so much from her.”

You would think the Department of Education would want to replicate Ms. Isaacson — who has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — and sprinkle Ms. Isaacsons all over town. Instead, the department’s accountability experts have developed a complex formula to calculate how much academic progress a teacher’s students make in a year — the teacher’s value-added score — and that formula indicates that Ms. Isaacson is one of the city’s worst teachers.

According to the formula, Ms. Isaacson ranks in the 7th percentile among her teaching peers — meaning 93 per cent are better.

10 March 23 Permalink

RCampus offers free rubrics here. Thanks Larry Ferlazzo for sharing this resource.

Source: larryferlazzo.edublogs.org

22 November 5 Permalink

34years:

Bill Ferriter has won numerous awards, yet his knows and admits his weaknesses in the classroom. He epitomizes the teacher we all strive to be; one who is always questioning what he does in the classroom, who notes what does and does not work, and who knows the teacher evaluation system is flawed and cannot be counted upon to provide the feedback he craves.

Source: 34years

6 November 6 34years Permalink

A principal shares what he is looking for while evaluating teachers.

3 November 10 Permalink