Teacher Evaluations Should Never Be About A Grade
Are we out of the line of fire yet? In the past two decades, educators have been in the line of fire from politicians, parents, tax payers and even administrators--and we are exhausted! We have weathered storms that described us as lazy and greedy, along with incompetent and irrelevant. These disparaging assertions have borne new ways to evaluate teachers with expensive evaluation tools and programs to determine if teachers are truly making the cut. So what's the verdict? Not much has changed! Since the inception of new evaluations methods and tools, many claim that there is not much change, but that there are new hurdles to jump and hoops to go through. Great teachers are still great! Evaluation tools can assist in dialog about teacher performance between the administrator and the teacher, and that's a great thing, but is it genuine dialog that will result in meaningful change-- or just better observation scores? Great teachers do not rely on formal observations to deem them...