To help ensure that teacher evaluations are balanced and have a meaningful impact, consider more creative and collaborative methods.
April 4, 2024 close modal Gregg Vignal / Alamy
Although there are state mandates regarding the evaluation of public school teachers, school districts have quite a bit of flexibility in how they choose to implement the guidelines. These subsequent district decisions are critically important, as they can have a direct impact on teachers’ job satisfaction.
As teachers create many of their own materials and are faced with multiple decisions each day, when observers take notes about their performance and then quantify it with a score, it can feel like a judgment of their worth. Reimagining the possibilities for teacher evaluations, particularly in the midst of a teacher shortage, is just one of many crucial steps toward increased teacher retention.
Observation processes may vary from district to district, but they all generally involve some iteration of this: An administrator previews a teacher’s lesson plan, observes the teacher’s class (either announced or unannounced), writes up a report, assigns a score, and then meets with the teacher to offer feedback for improvement.
This process may seem innocuous enough, but often there is nothing further from the truth. Observers could have a greater impact if they take the time to reflect on how they might be perceived by teachers by asking themselves questions such as the following:
If any of the answers to the above questions are “no,” it may inspire observers to approach future observations with a dose of humility and an inquisitive stance. As teaching is not a static profession, best teaching practices aren’t necessarily transferable across decades, grade levels, and varying demographics, as it requires a continual response to cultural shifts, generational changes, and students’ ever-changing needs.
Thus, the discrepancies between the experiences of observers and teachers not only can create a chasm that breeds resentment, but also they can make it difficult for teachers to welcome (let alone implement) the feedback given. Educational leader Tom Sherrington writes about how he spent many “wasted, pointless hours trying to craft well-written, pithy, insightful lesson reports to send to a teacher after a lesson observation.” Upon reflection, he came to this realization: “To presume your feedback will be meaningful, received and understood and, welcomed or not, acted upon—it’s just weird; folly. And deeply deeply wrong. Above all, it just seems, well… rude.” If the goal of observations is to promote teacher growth, the current system could use a reboot.
A brief visit to a teacher’s classroom isn’t sufficient to capture the complex calculus involved in the dynamics of a lesson. As John Hattie explains in an interview with Tes magazine, “You can’t simply watch a teacher and understand how and why they make those decisions; you have to hear them think, evaluate and adapt.”
In order to glean a fuller picture of a lesson and insight about the students, leaders can consider implementing the following steps:
If the goal of the teacher evaluation system is to improve teaching and learning, assigning scores accomplishes neither. It may do exactly the opposite, as the emotional resonance from the score can become a barrier that impedes improvement.
Districts can be creative in exploring the many alternatives to grading, such as measuring teacher performance throughout the year on a growth continuum, similar to evidence-based grading, which leaves a lot of space for feedback, conversation, and proposed action steps. If state mandates ultimately insist upon a score, districts can use the data from the year to assign a cumulative score at the end of the year. Educator Kim Marshall recently released “The Marshall Teacher Evaluation Rubric,” accessible by going to the “Kim’s Writing” section on the Marshall Memo website and following the link “Rubrics for end-of-year evaluation of teachers and principals.” This rubric aligns with many of the principles outlined here and is designed help observers, in Marshall’s words, “continuously grow as coaches of effective instruction.”
There is an abundance of research to support a collaborative leadership approach to help professionals grow. Entrepreneur Liz Wiseman advocates that leaders’ fundamental role is to multiply the intelligence of those they serve, organizational psychologist Adam Grant advises that the best way to effect enduring change is to “level the playing field,” and instructional coach Elena Aguilar offers conversational sentence stems to put these ideas into action.
As educators, when we work alongside each other in the best interests of students, we can work together toward enduring change.
We all get better by sharing our practices. Administrators, what are you doing to help ensure more equitable teacher evaluations at your school? Please add to the conversation in the comments.
