Home > Administrator's Desk Channel > Administrator's Desk Archive > Administrator's Desk Columnists > Pete Hall Archive > Pete Hall Article PETE HALL

Always Strive to Be a Better You

Turning Teacher Evaluations On Their Ears

Warning: Read this column only if you are interested in improving your school by maximizing the skill, effectiveness, and self-reflective abilities of your teaching staff. Do not read any further if you are looking for shortcuts, ways to avoid work, paperwork reduction, passing the buck, or generational wealth; the strategies and philosophy herein will probably not help with those things.

Where I live in Idaho, turkey season opens April 15 -- darn near the time we're scrambling to finish our taxes, reveling in the beginning of the baseball season, and, of course, writing our teacher evaluations.

I'm no hunter, but I pay taxes, love baseball, and set up camp in the principal's office this month. So it's an important, exciting time of year.

And, if you're like most principals, you probably also could use adjectives such as "stressful," "overwhelming," and "hectic" to describe teacher-evaluation time.

[content block] For decades, teacher evaluations have thrown us all for a loop. The scheduling, the classroom observations, the discussions, the reports, the checklists, the double-check-to-make-sure-we-haven't-written-anything-that-the-union-folks-will-use-to-flay-us-later routines-- it's an exhausting, demanding, tenuous adventure. Just ask our ulcers.

It's also a critical part of the most important work we do -- teacher improvement.

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL SCHOOLS DO IT

I'm sure you've all seen those widely circulated lists of characteristics shared by successful schools. One element finds itself onto every list I've seen. And if we were to prioritize, its impact on school improvement would be at the top, too. Of course, we're talking about teacher quality.

When it comes to the issue of teacher quality, there is probably no more eloquent spokesperson than Kati Haycock of The Education Trust. The fact is, Haycock says, that running a string of five consecutive high-quality teachers in the elementary grades eliminates -- not just reduces, but eradicates -- the achievement gap.

Yes, teacher quality matters immensely.

Which is why teacher evaluations matter immensely, too.

Teacher evaluation time is our opportunity to boost school improvement through teacher maximization (or, for those of you that like acronyms, SITTM).

SITTM is the only way to go.

IS SITTM ALIVE AND WELL
IN YOUR SCHOOL?

Every school district has unique requirements for the teacher evaluation process. Some districts require a set number of formal observation periods. Some districts have a very specific protocol for principals to follow throughout this process. That doesn't mean that all principals follow those guidelines lock-step, however. I have worked with many different school districts, and I have seen many different interpretations of the evaluation process in action.

You might not believe this (and you, as enlightened readers of this column, certainly haven't done this), but some principals write teachers' evaluations without ever stepping foot into their classrooms. Other principals cut-and-paste narratives and just change teachers' names or submit nearly identical evaluations year after year. Some hand over the duties to the teachers to write the evals themselves--without ever adding any input. And some others ignore the realities of a teacher's performance, favoring instead to scribe innocuous pleasantries in order to pacify the teacher and prolong the "culture of nice," which leads nowhere but to bland instruction, mediocre education, and a stultified status quo.

Ugh. There is no SITTM there.

But SITTM is not out of anyone's reach. Regardless of the time requirements we must spend in teachers' classrooms, regardless of the number and frequency of formal observations we must make, and regardless of the stipulations of the teachers' contracts and district protocol, one viewpoint remains startlingly clear: if we are going to improve our schools, we need to focus on the teachers.

WALK-THROUGHS AND
TEACHER EVALUATIONS:
DO THEY MIX?

If you're at all familiar with my work, you know how much I believe in the effectiveness of frequent, informal, classroom observations with specific feedback. We call those walk-throughs.

Many districts and teachers unions have addressed the walk-through issue in one form or another. In some places, information gathered from walk-throughs is not allowed to enter evaluation documents; only data collected during formal, pre-announced, scheduled, documented, signed-in-triplicate classroom observations can be used to provide summary feedback to teachers on their annual performance review. What kind of sick joke is that? I'm pretty sure there are children in the room 180 days a year, 6 hours a day--and I believe every teacher's final evaluation should match their actual, yearly performance.

As principals, we have an opportunity (and obligation) to truly affect the quality of teaching that goes on in our buildings. Let's not waste it. If the final evaluation document is truly meant to be an accurate assessment of each teacher's performance over the course of the year, great. Let's collect as much information and data as we can to determine what the teacher did, how effective s/he was at it, and what the implications are for future teaching. Here are some ideas: