Teaching and learning in the pandemic may have proved Descartes wrong. You don’t need to be in the classroom to see teaching to know that children learned. Historic teacher evaluation systems requiring principals to sit in the classroom observing teaching were disrupted by remote and virtual instruction. Prior to the pandemic, the evaluator needed to see the teacher doing teaching in order to evaluate the teaching. For several semesters this was not possible due to the pandemic. Yet, during the pandemic we still measured student learning performances and drew conclusions about a teacher’s work. There is no evidence that state school superintendent or school boards suspended the evaluation of teachers during the pandemic. Teachers were evaluated and contracts for subsequent school years were issued based upon a teachers work during the pandemic. Voila! The pandemic clarified that we can indeed use student learning outcomes to assess and evaluate a teacher’s proficiency in causing children to learn.
Let’s learn from this and change the construct of annual teacher evaluation.
WI Stat 115.415 states that 50% of a teacher’s evaluation will derive from student performance measures and 50% from the teacher’s demonstration of the INTASC standards. INTASC standards describe the requirements candidates for a teaching license must meet in teacher preparation programs. The legislature eliminated the use of statewide academic assessments as student performance measures in 2019-20 due to the pandemic – that year only. Accountability for student performance other wise was maintained in the statute. The legislature did not consider that remote teaching made administrators unable to observe a teacher’s comportment with the INTASC standards. Either this was short-sighted or it recognized that observing these standards is not required to evaluate a teacher’s work. I like the latter.
A continuing teacher evaluation practice looks like this. There is annual accountability for student learning.
The school board annually approves the district’s curriculum for grade level and subject courses. The district assigns licensed and prepared teachers to teach the approved curriculum. Students by age group or subject interest and readiness are divided into classes and assigned to teachers for instruction. The board’s expectation is that teachers will teach the assigned curriculum and students will learn that curriculum.
A new construct for teacher evaluation looks like this – principal/teacher agree on how the teacher will be evaluated, including specific student performances and teaching required to achieve those performances.
Why is principal/teacher agreement necessary? Each class assignment is different, even for multiple sections of the same grade or subject, because the children in the assignment are different. Each child approaches learning differently, some with known learning challenges and others with exceptional ease of learning. The pandemic made this loudly clear in our remote education experience. Individualization of instruction is more necessary now than ever before.
Secondly, the pandemic created greater learner spread. From their remote experience, many children display missed or incomplete learning from the past two years of instruction. There are a variety of reasons for this, but none matter today. The challenges of making their learning complete is the matter. Today, there is greater variance in learning status and readiness than in the pre-pandemic and this variance will not be alleviated quickly.
As new practice, the principal and each teacher create an annual evaluation plan for the teacher. They discuss the goals of the assigned curriculum and consider how the children assigned will require instructional modification and individualization in order to successfully learn the curriculum. The evaluation plan recognizes different teaching for different classes and different children in each class.
The principal and teacher determine the student performances that will be used to evaluate the teaching of these children this school year. The target is that all children will successfully learn the curriculum – the evaluated strategies for target achievement will differ teacher to teacher. Last year’s measures may not fit this year’s class and the measures for the teacher in the next classroom may not fit this class.
Stop using the same evaluative measures for all teachers when we know that every teaching assignment is different.
This is not a weighting of teacher evaluations due to differences in children assigned. All children will be successful learners. This is differentiating and personalizing the evaluation measures used to determine that all children learned and acknowledging the teacher’s proficiency in teaching to all children.
Teacher evaluation too frequently is contentious and burdensome. Stop making it so. When principals and teachers collaborate in determining what will be evaluated they are equally invested in the teacher’s success. Principals can gather evidence without the old scenario of everyone in the class knowing that on this day the principal is sitting in the back of the classroom watching the teacher and students as he evaluates the teacher. Everyone also knew in yesteryear the principal would not be sitting in the back of the classroom evaluating tomorrow, next week, or next month. Evaluation was like a dental check-up – do it once a year and get it over with. This stilted scenario didn’t work well, so stop using it.
The pandemic causes us to look at many of our usual practices asking “Why would we want to do it that way now?”. Teacher evaluation is one of those. Today we have too much at risk in the business of educating children; we cannot use systems that do not work. We can collaborate, identify real learning targets and teaching strategies, and be accountable for evaluating teacher proficiency in causing learning without watching Descartes’ trees fall.