When I was told during the last meeting that I would be taking on the role of a professional developer next year, I felt the tension of the role change. Today brings me to the idea of evaluation of teachers.
What is the normal practice for improving teaching? One assumption made is to supervise and evaluate teachers. But is this the best way? Surely, the argument for, will be inspecting classroom performance and giving teachers feedback and lesson observation and formal evaluation would make a positive difference.
But when I reflected on what the above assumption was saying, I begin to beg to differ. When I thought back to when I was started off as a classroom teacher 6 years ago and wondered if such yearly evaluations had ever led me to make significant improvements in the way I normally taught. I would honestly say there is typically little or some impact. What was important to me was not just getting the evaluation and the feedback but rather the suggestions on the course of actions to make the mentioned significant classroom improvement. And I wondered the responses from school leaders and fellow experienced middle managers regarding after all the work they put into all those classroom visits, write-ups and post observation conferences; do they readily see much difference in what their teachers do in the daily classroom teaching?
I know that such thinking is disturbing. As it only means that many middle managers are spending huge amount of time on the process that rarely improves classroom teaching on a daily basis.
This thinking has gotten me to start to look for leveraging strategies that can improve and influence teaching practices. As a new people developer, it is an important first step to enabling effective teaching of my teachers.
True, one of our key role as PD is to enable our teachers to become more skillful in their teaching. However, this is not the only role; we are tasked to take care of the whole person who sits across us at each work review. The responsibility of becoming a more skillful teacher is held jointly by our teachers, their IP department (HoD, SH/LH/ST, PLTs,) and us.
ReplyDeleteOur appraisal system is holistic in nature, with a key emphasis on quality teaching. Here is where the IP Head's inputs are critical. And yes, if the Heads merely observe, record and judge, there cannot be much growth. There must be constant feedback, specific actions that can be taken to improve pupils' learning. Teachers must learn and contribute data and ideas for critique at their PLT.