Evaluating Teachers

I recently had a lesson plan that I'd created evaluated, so I was very interested in the announcement this last week that Maryland will use a qualitative assessment of lessons plans in their overall evaluation of teachers. Principals will be doing the assessing of lesson plans along with their assessment of the environment of the classroom and "other factors that the local school system can determine." Those 'other factors' are intriguing, and I'd like to know more about what that means. I'm betting that Baltimore teachers will want to know what those 'other factors' are, too.

The headlines are reporting not about the lesson plan assessment, though. The headline writers are excited that student test scores will also be included in the overall evaluation. The article in the Sun mentions that 75% of teachers teach things that aren't measured by the standardized tests, which is going to be a huge problem. That very obvious problem, along with the fact that standardized tests are lousy tools to measure student learning, makes their effectiveness at measuring the teaching, a very different thing than learning, doubtful at best.

I don't think it needs to be that hard. The process that was used to assess my lesson plan could also be used to assess student learning. My lesson plan, for a whole unit on science and writing for upper elementary students, will even be available for you to assess, too. It will be posted later this week on Moodleshare. I created this unit as part of the the District 287 Ed Tech ARRA grant (don't try to view this overview if you're on a Minneapolis Public School connection that still blocks YouTube.) When this unit is taught, the student work can also be assessed. Other teachers can use this unit, too. They can comment and make additions and modifications after they've tried it with their students and had their principals assess it. It will be possible for anyone to also assess the student work (with appropriate permissions, of course.) I'm sure that the unit will get better the more it's used and shared.

Jon Fila, the brilliant architect and administrator of this project, did what good administrators are supposed to do. He pushed me to stretch my practice, to go beyond what I'd done before. I've used Moodle for four years in a blended elementary classroom setting, but I've not had much experience with an online only elementary course. Jon pointed out that since this course was to be designed to be used online only I needed to add and change some things to accommodate for the fact that I wouldn't be present in the same room with my students every day to check for understanding and clarify expectations like I'm used to doing. I'm also looking forward to comments from other teachers who might use all or parts of this unit with their students.

Online and or blended learning (using online tools in a F2F classroom) enable the kind of assessment that's being wished for in the Maryland plan but is not likely to happen if principals do what they've sort of always done - flip through spiral lesson plan books on desks, look at posters and charts on the wall, and listen and watch for 30-50 minutes, maybe, from some uncomfortable spot in the room with clipboards and pens in hand. And then, maybe catch the teacher with a note about the 'observation.' That's what passes as assessment by a principal in most of today's classrooms. It's not really surprising that the ideal of this spiral bound plan book, poster, and clipboard method never really gets done thoroughly, certainly not consistently across buildings and districts. It's not effective in the best of circumstances, and a real waste of lots of people's time in most circumstances. Real qualitative assessment and collaboration between administrators, teachers, and students can happen a lot more easily if current tools are used, but that's going to require a sea change that will take longer than the hype that is being hoped for in Baltimore. Maybe the Maryland people are thinking about Moodle as one of the 'other factors.' We can hope.