What (or who) is the best method (or person) to evaluate the effectiveness of educators?

[kid a]

Poll question: What (or who) is the best method (or person) to evaluate the effectiveness of educators?

I teach in a high school where individual, tenured teachers are evaluated by the administration on a 3 year cycle (once a year - every three years). That does not include informal and interdepartmental (non-administrative) requirement checks and folder evaluations. Some teachers seem to love having their peers/colleagues evaluate them, others deplore it. I've sat through hundreds of hours of faculty meetings where the only article on the agenda was the rubric for scoring a fellow teachers annual file of student essays (basically - another teacher evaluating your teaching/grading methods). I am not sure how often the information gathered by the department head is shared with the admin.

[mike_c]

1. students are notoriously poor evaluators of educational effectiveness....

...which is one of the main reasons that "business models" of education administration fail, IMO. In the end, virtually all student evaluations come down to measures of personal satisfaction with the peripheral experiences that attended instruction in a class. Students are often the LEAST able to judge educational effectiveness because their learning often takes time-- sometimes years-- to manifest in ways that are meaningful to the students themselves-- and by the time that happens, the overwhelming majority of us dissociate the meaning from prior educational experiences.

The notion that student evaluations are meaningful comes directly from the business model that equates students with consumers of educational services, and seeks to use customer satisfaction as a measure of institutional success. But that model fails because education is not a product. In the end, all educators "sell"-- the only product they offer-- is opportunity to learn. "Opportunity" is a difficult thing to quantify, and more to the point, it's nearly impossible for the recipients to judge the quality of the opportunities they're given until much later in their lives, but by then their judgments are hopelessly muddled by other experiences and attitudes.

[CTyankee]

2. I voted for the mix. That way a teacher's competence/excellence doesn't rise or fall

on a couple of disgruntled colleagues or an unrealistic principal or kids with limited perspectives. A composite picture would be ideal, IMO...

[exboyfil]

3. Is trying to evaluate if a teacher is bad

kind of like obscenity. You can't define it, but you know it if you see it.

My best teacher in High School (Honor's English) would have gotten mixed marks from me at the time. Later I feel her and my 11th grade Chemistry teachers were easily the two best in preparing me for college even though they were two of the more disliked faculty members. The best I got were Bs in those classes. I still had enough perception to know that their treatment was good for me.

I got an A in my utterly useless senior Physics class taught by an engineer (and I use the term taught loosely). In no way did she prepare me for college (unlike my Junior College Physical Science class which I took the summer before my senior year). She was our favorite, but most of my friends thought she was miscast as a teacher (we lost our very good Physics teacher the year before). I don't know if she ever became a good teacher, but she started poorly.

My daughter has very good perception for the quality of her teachers, and it has nothing to do with her grades. For the good ones she goes the extra mile producing extraordinary work in a short amount of time. The others she does what is expected (still excellent work) but has pointed things to say about them. Part is interest (Science) but part is wanting to see passion and committment from her teachers (also control of the class).

The one teacher which she has issues with I feel is teaching them a valuable lesson. After tests he pairs them "randomly" with another student and has them work on correcting their tests (getting points back for correcting wrong answers). It sounds like he power pairs them to me - putting the ones with high grades with the one with low grades. In the first two cases her grade could not be improved while her partner got to reap big benefits from the arrangement. I laughed at her the last time she complained and tried to tell her it was better than a whole lot of other formulaes that he could have used like averaging their points and giving them the same grade. At least she got to keep what she earned. Of course the class is Economics.

[LWolf]

4. Faulty question.

There is no single "best" method, just as there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution that will work for all students.

I don't think much of the standard evaluation. I'm mot sure what would be a better replacement.

About 15 years ago, I had an admin that did his observations differently. He stopped in the room frequently, unannounced, for casual, real life observations, all year. Took notes. Wrote up his evaluation based on what he saw happening on a normal day, all year long, rather than on a prepared lesson for a scheduled observation. I liked that; it was more authentic. I don't know if it measured my effectiveness, though.

Charlotte Danielson has some interesting work out dealing with observation and evaluation, but it's done from a different perspective. The purpose is not to grade teachers' effectiveness, but to support teachers, from the weakest to the strongest, in becoming even better at what they do. That's probably more useful, and a more effective way to improve instruction, than any method of "grading" teachers.

I think it would be a better way to evaluate students than grades, too.

[kid a]

6. I agree - there is no "best" one way. Regardless, teachers and job performance will be evaluated

One distinction is between individual evaluation vs. school (or district) evaluation.

I agree that standardized tests have a function, but should NOT be the ONLY function in evaluating student learning and teacher effectiveness.

[LWolf]

7. I don't agree that standardized tests have any place at all

in teacher evaluation.

Evaluate me based on what I do; not on what someone else does.

Students aren't passive recipients of instruction. We don't open their skulls and poor learning into them. Their level of engagement is key. I am not a dog and pony show; I am not there to entertain them (although learning is certainly fun and entertaining for those who want it to be.)

I am not accountable for what they do with the opportunities they are given.

[Le Taz Hot]

5. Other

A third-party organization that specializes in teacher evaluations.