Evaluating Teachers: Part Three

Well, it's pretty clear that the legislators over in St. Paul have not been reading my blog. As I said in my previous two posts, using student's test scores on standardized tests is an ineffective way to evaluate teachers. There are links in both of those posts to well articulated reasons why test scores are not a good idea. To be fair, according to the StarTribune report today, the legislators have not specified that test scores need to be used to determine student academic growth. "School districts will also have to start new periodic evaluations of teachers based on a loose set of guidelines. Thirty-five percent of that evaluation must be based on student academic growth. If districts and unions cannot agree to an evaluation plan, they must use one outlined by the education commissioner."

I'll hold out a little bit of hope that at least one or two districts in the state will attempt to determine student academic growth by using something other than standardized test scores. But even if a couple of districts manage to use authentic assessment methods, most districts will rely on some standardized test score. While ineffective and expensive, it's easy and accepted. What's likely to happen is that we'll end up with a hodge podge of ways to determine student academic growth and a hodge podge way of applying that information to teacher pay schemes. I think we're well on our way to making the current mess even messier.

You know, of course, that I'm a Moodle advocate. It's a tool that can be used for most of the many aspects of teaching and learning. Most significantly, for this discussion, Moodle provides the means to assess student academic growth in a whole bunch of ways that can be about as detailed as you want to make them; it also provides a real way to assess or evaluate the work of teachers while actually making authentic correlations of the teacher work to student academic growth. The final outcome could even be enumerated, if necessary, which is what is so attractive to the folks pushing the idea of using test scores.

One of the big reasons, I think, that the currently accepted ways of measuring academic growth is going to be pitiful, in addition to the reasons listed in the articles I've linked to in my two most recent posts, is that teaching and learning is changing, and it will be continuing to change very rapidly, and the standardized testing method doesn't have a prayer of keeping pace with the changes that are happening in learning and teaching.

Take for example Grovo, one of the new companies that will be a force in changing teaching and learning. Grovo isn't in schools, yet, and it's 'only' teaching new high tech types of things, so far. But, it's a method of student centered 24/7 kind of learning that will be what students of all kind are looking for soon. Well, students want Grovo lessons, now. Grovo, so far, doesn't have a way to report student work. I heard a rumor that they might be working on some kind of way to do that - I would recommend using Moodle. Even without built in reporting tools, Grovo and Grovo types of learning environments could easily be ported to electronic Portfolios, which is the way that academic growth will eventually be measured. Yes, portfolios are more complicated than a raw score/percentile score/growth score report, but then teaching and learning is way more complicated than a raw score/percentile score/growth score, isn't it?

And then we have Sophia, my local favorite to make a real dent in how teaching and learning happens in the next months and years. Sophia has actually taken a step toward assessing and evaluating the work of teachers. The posted lessons (learning packets in Sophia speak) are rated by people who already have credentials or experience in the topic area. Sophia has taken the all important step in teaching and learning of including a discussion board and grouping tool. (Full disclosure: I know they're thinking about ways to report out student work to portfolio tools because they picked my brain for a few hours re: Moodle etc. The Sophia folks are very talented, creative, and brave, and I don't think they'll mind me saying that they're open to any ideas you might have, too.)

Socrative is small and new and way out there in New York City by Grovo, but this tool has legs, IMHO. They've leap frogged a lot of the people trying to do something new in education by going right to mobile devices of any kind. Because the Socrative tool is limited in the way that Twitter is limited, it's simple and small, it also has the flexibility to be adapted to all kinds of teaching and learning. Student and teacher work is immediately portable and quantifiable. The issue with Socrative is getting admin people, teachers, too, up to speed on how to actually use all of that raw real data. Tangentially, I think there will also be a learning curve in how to use the tool for optimum pedagogical effect, but it should be a quick curve.

Betterlesson.org is already big and not so different from the way we've always done things in the past. It's really just a big online folder full of reproducible lessons - a black line master lesson book on the web. The good news is that there's hardly anything a teacher needs to learn about using Betterlesson.org that's different from the way things were done in the 1970s, and that's the bad news, too. It's an example of how to use technology to keep doing things the same old way. But, it still has enough variety to really mess up a plan to use standardized tests.

I'm trying to think of the right way to tie-up this post to say that standardized tests are already obsolete before the laser printed bills over in St. Paul cool down to room temp. They were obsolete even before that.

July 25, 2011
A really cool thing about blogs is that you can edit them. This morning I received a Tweet (from Knewton) with a link which said it was about their online learning platform. Since I'd just done a brief review of some eLearning platform type tools, I was curious to learn more about what Knewton was up to. It turns out that the article under the link is actually an interview with George Siemens about how new technologies, like Knewton and the ones I mentioned above, can change teacher evaluation and several other aspects of education, as well. That's what I was getting at in these last three posts.

I've admired and commented about George's work before. His thorough and articulate analysis of the possibilities of eLearning is most definitely worth a read.

Evaluating Teachers: Part Two

As I said in my previous post, using student's test scores on standardized tests is an ineffective way to evaluate teachers. If you want more on why it's ineffective try Joanne Barkan's op-ed in TruthOut. She also does a great job of explaining a few of the other big challenges facing public education these days.

I argued in that last post that evaluating the work of both teachers and students will be easier when that work is done electronically, at least recorded electronically, most likely on the web using some kind of cloud implement. If you want to see an example of what that might look like, check out either of the Bring Your Own Technology Webinars done by Classlink about its LaunchPad service. Cloud computing will enable school districts to get out of the business of supplying computers for learning, a business at which most school districts are very bad, and it will enable students and teachers to use the tools the rest of the planet is already using to communicate and create.

Moodleshare, where I posted the teaching and learning unit on Bird Observation, is one of the many new repositories of learning content that can be managed via cloud computing tools. The fact that learning content will soon be mostly in the cloud, or at least off the shelf, is fostering a whole host of various ways to create, deliver, and manage teaching and learning content.

I like Moodleshare for lots of reasons beyond the fact that they paid me to be part of the ARRA grant to produce Moodle units. Other reasons would be: they're right here in Minnesota, they're some really smart people doing the work there, and they focus on Moodle, the teaching and learning tool I've been using for the last four years. Jon Fila, one of the masterminds of Moodleshare recently reported that "Between Late-August 2010 and Mid-June 2011,there were 180,606 page views from 55,662 unique visitors. These visitors were from 179 different countries/territories. 39,000 of which were from the United States. Of the U.S. visits, 6,255 of them were from Minnesota. Two of the top three courses accessed on MoodleShare were from the grant uploads." It would seem that I'm not alone in liking Moodleshare.

Now, you might be saying, "yeah, but the units on Moodleshare will require lots of time and work by teachers and students and people to do the evaluating of the teaching and learning before we know if they're any good." Aha, you've just hit on one of the best kept secrets about education - it takes a lot of time and work, and it's complicated, but it's all very doable, especially with the corps of teachers we've already got in classrooms. Some of it is rocket science; some of it is just plain science. A lot of it is about reading and writing. And, in case you haven't seen an iPad, or T-Mobile, or Kindle commercial lately, reading and writing is now being done electronically on a whole bunch of different kind of devices that access the web or the cloud.

The valued added measures,VAMs, being touted everywhere these days are certainly a small incremental improvement over the old ways of 'measuring' teaching and learning. But they're still just resorting the same numbers that were generated in the same way they've always been. Defining and evaluating teaching and learning in this 21st Century can't be done by simply downloading sets of numbers that were generated by students filling in bubbles on either screens or pieces of paper. That will take us down a path that will get us to about the same place that the NCLB has gotten us; we'll still just be looking at the final score as it's printed in the next days paper. In order to actually see the 'game' of teaching and learning, or better yet, participate, we'll need to use the literacy and measuring tools that are concurrent with the world in which we live.

Some of the new organizations with great ideas that I think can make a difference in teaching and learning and evaluating teaching and learning are:

Betterlesson.org
Sophia
Socrative
Grovo

The next post will be a more in depth look at how those tools will make a difference.

And, I'm always open to new suggestions...