I was writing a journal for another course, and in it, I started questioning the purpose of clinical observations, and why current teacher evaluations are missing the mark. According to Danielson & McGreal’s book “Teacher Evaluation to Enhance Professional Practice” current evaluations achieve neither “quality assurance nor professional growth effectively” ( p. 9). I agree wholeheartedly with this statement; formal evaluations happen once or twice a year, and when they do, they turn into a “dog and pony show” where teachers show principals the lessons that highlight their strengths, but do not show the type of teaching that happens routinely in their classroom. Throughout this semester, I’ve been struggling with how we can strive for professional growth, given the hierarchical relationship between the supervisor and supervised. If an evaluation is filled out to promote the growth of a teacher, but at the same time is used to evaluate him or her, how can we build trust? How can we create a school culture where teachers know that they can be honest and make mistakes during formal observations, without being penalized for them?
Danielson & McGreal propose that teachers and administrators collaboratively decide on a rich set of teaching standards that reflect what we know about good teaching practices. I agree that this is important, the ensuing dialogue will help develop standards that represent what good teaching looks like in a particular school, with the hope that once the supervising tool is developed, it is“owned” by all staff members within it. In addition, just like we would differentiate instruction for students in our classrooms, we must also differentiate the evaluations for teachers according to their experience. For novice teachers, it is important to stress that the general expectation is not for them to do everything perfectly, for veteran teachers, we must make sure we celebrate the accomplishments where they have shown growth compared to other years.
We need to restructure observations in order to use teacher’s “needs improvement categories” as a point of conversation, not shame, and to be sure to praise them for the moments of outstanding work they do everyday. As supervisors, we need to be aware that we do not know everything, (most teachers’ content knowledge on a subject will exceed our own). Above all, we have to include teacher’s input, and knowledge about what is happening in their classroom before we make our "judgements". Formal observations, are after all, are only a small snapshot of what happens every day.
