From the Orlando Sentinel, by Leslie Postal
High-school chemistry teacher Steve Fannin was honored recently in Washington, D.C., as one of the nation's best math and science educators.
Fannin, a 31-year veteran of Tallahassee schools, has mastery of his subject and "exemplary" classroom skills, according to the judges of the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.
Yet when Fannin was evaluated under Florida's new teacher-assessment system, the results weren't so impressive.
A mid-year evaluation identified him as a "beginning" teacher.
His failing? Fannin had erased the day's "learning goal" from his board to make room for information to help his students grasp the chemistry lesson at hand.
"It's just been real frustrating all the way around," Fannin said of the new system. "I don't see how that promotes innovation. I don't see how that helps student learning."
His views are echoed by teachers across the state, who say a classroom-observation system meant to improve their teaching instead reduces their work to what one Lyman High School educator called a "humongous checklist" of "artificial gestures."
In some districts, for example, teachers felt judged mostly on whether their students used hand gestures to indicate how well they had learned something and on whether they wrote "learning goals" on the board every day.
"I definitely felt it didn't capture everything I was doing," said Liz Randall, who teaches English at Lyman.
"It's been humiliating for a lot of extremely accomplished people," added Mary Louise Wells, a longtime Orange County teacher who in 2002 was one of five finalists for the state teacher of the year award.
"A lot of it is very clear, good educational practice," Wells said of the new evaluation plan but it was implemented so quickly and so rigidly that it made "a mockery of what I think the goal is."
The system was introduced this past school year and is part of the new teacher evaluations required under a sweeping teacher merit-pay law the Florida Legislature adopted last year.
The most controversial piece of the law, which has been challenged in court by the state teachers union, requires that student test-score data be used to help judge teacher quality and, eventually, help set pay.
The law says half of a teacher's evaluation will be based on that test-score information and the other half on a new, more-detailed way of observing teachers in action.
Implementing the new observation system has not been easy, conceded Robert Marzano, the education researcher whose evaluation plan was chosen as Florida's model and then adopted by 31 school districts, including most in Central Florida.
His organization said some districts have initially focused too narrowly on certain aspects of the plan, ignoring the complexity that is teaching, and frustrating teachers in the process. The state's quicker-than-ideal timeline for implementation likely created those problems as did districts' phased-in implementation of the plan, it said.
But Florida, Marzano said, "is doing some amazing things" and its efforts to revamp teacher evaluations are an important part of a national push to do away with traditional reviews that deemed most every teacher "satisfactory."
His complicated plan aims to hone in on teaching activities he says will lead to improved student learning. It involves four broad "domains" and 60 strategies to help teachers "get better over time."
Marzano is a former teacher and professor who has promoted his books and work on teaching through his Marzano Research Laboratory in Colorado. His new teacher-evaluation plan has become popular recently as a number of other states, including New Jersey and Oklahoma, have adopted it as they also look to overhaul how they judge teacher quality.
Florida used about $4.7 million of its federal Race to the Top money to develop its model, parts of which were also adopted by those districts that picked other evaluation systems besides Marzano's.
Advocates say they think teachers will come to view it positively.
"The beauty of this is the assumption that everybody can get better, everybody can become a master teacher," said Merewyn Lyons, the administrator for Orange County schools who is overseeing the district's plan.
But Lyons said it is a huge, time-consuming "culture shift" that the state wanted done very quickly. "We really have been kind of learning on the fly."
The new law kicked in last July and required the new evaluation systems be used in the 2011-12 school year.
The new systems are more time consuming for both teachers and principals, who have detailed reports to fill out.
"They had to spend a lot more time in the classroom, which is a good thing, except the other things they had to do didn't go away," said Boyd Karns, the Seminole County administrator who is overseeing his district's plan. But Karns added, "It's creating a lot of conversations about what good instruction is."
The system works best with a year of training and planning, which didn't happen here, said Michael Toth, chief executive officer of Learning Science International, which is helping implement the Marzano model.
Without lots of training, he said, administrators sometimes focus too much on making sure teachers comply with certain Marzano strategies, such as putting "learning goals" and "scales" — a way for students to track how far they've come in meeting a goal — on their classroom boards.
In some schools, including many in Orange, the scales were hand gestures — hold up four fingers if you understand a concept well, for example, and two if you still need help — that students were told to use to show how well they had learned something.
Teachers, feeling panicky and confused, said they got the message that putting learning goals on their boards and making sure students used the scales — at least when an administrator came to observe — were keys to a decent review.
"I'm going crazy! Because of this whole merit pay mess ... we have to have all this junk on our boards," wrote one teacher on the proteacher.net website.
On the teachers.net site, someone wrote of Marzano, "most of us now use his name as an epithet."
Tom Beard, a Winter Park High government teacher, said he opposes the test-score piece of the merit-pay law and calls the implementation of the new observation system "not wonderful."
Still, he found benefits to the new system that made him reflect more on what he was providing his students.
"It forces me as a teacher to say, 'What am I really trying to teach you?' ''
On his campus, "the fear and the trepidation" eased as the school year progressed. "Next year's going to be different than this year," he said.
lpostal@tribune.com or 407-420-5273
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-07-13/features/os-florida-teacher-evaluations-20120713_1_new-teacher-evaluations-evaluation-plan-teacher-merit-pay-law?pagewanted=all
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