May 22, 2008 5:00 PM
The UFT agrees that teachers can be evaluated on how well students learn, but insists students’ high-stakes-test results do not reflect an individual teacher’s effectiveness. The union also thinks peer review and support are critical.
Writing in Education Week, Kim Marshall, a 32-year classroom teacher, central-office administrator and principal in the Boston public schools, also says the “value added” approach of measuring the gains that students make from September to May is too short a period to make a judgment. He adds that more frequent visits to classrooms in place of what some call principals’ once-a-year “drive-bys” don’t really help, either.
So what does?
Marshall favors focusing on what students actually learn, but without making test results part of teacher evaluations. He would junk reviewing individual lesson plans and instead institute teacher teams that plan curriculum units and create final tests or performance tasks even before instruction begins. He wants high-quality common interim assessments that “supply each teacher team with timely diagnostic information that makes it possible to fix learning problems, help struggling students, and continuously improve instruction.”
He also advocates student involvement, instructional coaching, including “in-the-moment assessments to catch student errors in real time,” mini-observations, combined with “candid face-to-face conversations with each observed teacher within 24 hours.” And he’d get rid of checklists of correct practices, too, because there’s no one right way to teach.
“Administrators should be looking at interim results with their teachers,” Marshall says, “identifying the most effective practices and improving what’s not working. This approach makes sense in human terms and it’s also good management. When teachers reach that frustrating point where they’ve taught something and significant numbers of students haven’t reached mastery, what will motivate them to hang in there, untangle students’ confusions, and improve their craft? A SWAT team of evaluators supervising the heck out of them? Test scores determining their evaluation? Merit pay? I doubt it.”
What works, Marshall says, are “teams [that] constantly check for understanding, feed each other ideas, fine-tune their teaching, push each other to do better, and follow up with every child.”
Education Week, May 7