A recent feed from the Department of Education covered some of the work that schools are doing as a part of the Race to the Top program. http://www.ed.gov/blog/2011/07/school%E2%80%99s-on-for-summer-states-engage-teachers-in-race-to-the-top/ According to the feed, this work is aimed to “fundamentally redefin[e] the education landscape in America.” I'm not exactly sure that it will have such a dramatic impact. Nonetheless, our school is working through the summer in an attempt to jump through the bureaucratic hoops set out by the government.
To kick off the summer our school improvement team attended a leadership conference focused on the new evaluation process. Charlotte Danielson came and spoke about her work related to school improvement and ways that it could possibly be turned into components of evaluation. Our next step is to work through a professional committee to use what we have learned to design a new evaluation that will be used for all teachers and administered each year.
The one thing that I found truly interesting about Ms. Danielson's perspective was the goal of evaluation. Typically, evaluations have been viewed as punitive tasks that are used to punish teachers. It was sort of the administrator's tool to "get" teachers that they didn't like. However, according to Ms. Danielson evaluations should be used to help teachers grow in their professional development. While there will be some things in the evaluation that maybe didn't go well, these should be viewed as areas for growth rather than negatives.
In order for this to happen there needs to be a great deal of trust between teachers and administrators within a school district. Further, those performing evaluations need to be trained to conduct them properly and effectively. This may be a tall order for local school districts as they continue to cut administrative staff.
No comments:
Post a Comment