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Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Perhaps feedback from parents and students and if not perhaps a rock a rock to the head will improve teacher evaluations.

This former is one of the suggestions that a panel at UNF about teacher evaluations came up with. It’s similar to one of the suggestions that Bill Gates spent 50 million dollars to come up with. It was bad then and it is bad now.

Here is the thing. If teachers want to send home to parents or give their classes feedback forms them I think that’s great. The more information teachers have the better but only they should see it and under no circumstances should parent and especially student feedback be used in teacher observations.

Some kids today are to savvy not to use this little power to blackmail their teachers. Oh I can’t have an extension, extra credit assignments, what you expect me to study or do my work, well let’s just see whose evaluation suffers.

The entire notion is ludicrous.

Do you want to know how to have quality teacher evaluations and it doesn’t involve tying teachers to standardized tests either. It involves good leadership. It involves principals that are fair and knowledgeable, who have the pulse of the school and who knows how to motivate, develop and improve teachers.

Good principals more than feedback from students (a terrible idea) or standardized tests results (even worse) are what we need. They will know who is performing or not and they will know who can improve or not.

It’s not rocket science here people, let’s stop trying to make it so.

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