Leadership Matters - February 2013

SB 7: Growing pains —–—————————————————————————

informal or formal observations. I predict teacher evaluators will use video to record the actual teaching as well as use the video in the reflective conference with the teacher. In addition, the district can make a video library of effective teaching to show new teachers and teachers needing improvement. It is difficult for high school administrators to evaluate content knowledge of the teaching if they are observing teaching in a field that they do not have a professional educational background. For example, how does an evaluator judge content in a foreign language classroom when only the foreign language is spoken? Or, judge the content in an AP Calculus classroom? This stresses the need for peer evaluators. Peer evaluators will need to go through the pre-qualification training as administrators but they could provide excellent evidence on content knowledge. These peers would need to be teachers who had previously been rated as Excellent. Student input for grades 6 through 12 would provide valuable information the administrator could use. Illinois has developed a climate survey titled “5Essentials” and the questions asked in this survey could be very helpful for the administrator to use when rating student-teacher relations, expectations, etc… In conclusion there are many unsettled issues that need to be resolved before full implementation of principal and teacher performance evaluation systems. Collective bargaining issues, how to calculate and use student growth measures, the collective interpretation of what “Distinguished/ Excellent” means, more Danielson training for both administrators and teachers, change in the daily routine and job function of building level administrators and finally determining how to calculate the final teacher summative rating.

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This was also noted by The Next Generation of Teacher Evaluation Systems study as a challenge. In my work with teacher evaluators, I recommend that they schedule these formal and informal observations. What gets on an administrator’s calendar gets done. By scheduling observations the administrator can dedicate the time needed to do this work. An average school administrator (in my informal polling of administrators as I have trained over 1,500 in Illinois) indicates about 23 teachers per evaluator. An evaluator would need to conduct 23 x 10 or 230 observations in an evaluation cycle. Assuming all these teachers are tenured this would be 230 out of the 360 possible attendance days in a two year time period, or less than one day. However, good evaluation systems would include a reflective conversation with each teacher after each informal and formal observation. This increases the number to 460 obligations out of 360 days. Assuming the administrator would not be able to observe or meet on 10% of the days this leaves 460 obligations out of 324 days or .75 or one per day. Remember, about 8 of the 10 observations are informal which amounts to 10 or 15 minutes each. To arrive at a joint decision on how to summative rate the teacher using professional practice and student growth A real sticking point will be when the joint committee decides to determine how the final rating will be calculated. The law says that for professional practice the rating “Shall quantify the relative importance of each portion of the framework to the final professional practice rating.” This can be done using mathematics or using words but I think districts need to be aware of the Danielson FFT key concept that Domain 3, Instruction, is the heart of the frameworks and Component 3c, Engaged Learning, is the heart of the heart of the frameworks. This domain and component need to have high importance for professional practice. Combining professional practice and student growth will add a high degree of difficulty to the summative rating. There has been no final guidance from ISBE or the Performance Evaluation Advisory Council on how to do this. Most districts are waiting for some type of state model or recommendation. This calculation will be vital to the acceptance and trust placed in this new evaluation paradigm. Predictions on future changes to this evaluation process It is extremely hard for a teacher evaluator to script all that is happening within a classroom for

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