Years ago, our school system took the progressive step of having teachers design their own professional development plans as the major component of our evaluation. The object was to encourage and empower teachers as researchers and collaborators who, in consultation with an administrator, used their observation, data, and reflection to improve their practice. In my opinion, the concept was never fully realized, mostly due to time constraints on teachers and administrators alike, but the PDP, like so many things in education, was something that the more you put into it, the more you got out of it.
Flash forward to these times of connecting teacher evaluation (and in many places, teacher pay) to "performance." Much has been written about the difficulty of finding an objective, much less fair, measure of teacher performance. Everyone agrees that student achievement should be the primary consideration, however the variables impacting a given student's achievement as well as the absence of an effective tool to measure it, can make any discussion of such rather contentious.
In addition to a rather cherished reputation for progressive best practices, our school system also has a less celebrated habit of going through the back door to implement key policies and procedures. Call me cynical, but I have sat through a lot of meetings of several committees where, by the end of the process, it seems as if the conclusion was foregone from the beginning and the group merely convened to put that stamp of collaboration on a top-down decision.
Re-enter the PDP. This year we are all being strongly encouraged, if not required, by our administrators to tie the results of our classroom-based research to "student achievement" in the form of high stakes, standardized test scores.
Yes. Our system is so progressive, they are forcing us to use the flawed measures available to evaluate ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment