The Journey Begins

Although my journey to improve my teaching began when I actually first stepped foot into a classroom 29 years ago, my current passion improve the evaluation system.  Earlier in the year I was selected as one of twenty-nine participants for the California Teachers Association Leadership Cohort.  For two days my fellow colleagues and myself met at CTA headquarters in Burlingame learning and discussing  the various facets of leadership in the educational environment.  Our foundation was based on the book
Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School by Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan.

At the end of our session each participant was to compose a project idea that would reflect leadership in an educational setting.  The projects ranged from site initiatives to create professional learning communities to district level projects to help retain teachers, provide for better communication for parents and create enduring professional development.  My project arose from my passion to improve myself as a teacher.

Over my career I have been evaluated many times, but with very few actual meaningful outcomes.  Despite the fact that teachers become tenured in my district after two years of successful evaluations, most teacher desire a professional conversation about their teaching and truly would like to improve their teaching if someone was able to actually pinpoint areas of needing improvement. Most veteran teachers have endured the perfunctory observation and subsequent written evaluation of their teaching in which an administrator has darted into the classroom and checked off a list and left quickly on their way to another observation that needed to be done before the deadline.  The subsequent conversation about the observation was equally unproductive if it actually took place as an administrator would briefly discuss their findings and the teacher would sign off. Deal is done! Time to move on.

The work begin with meeting with my local union president and CTA representative in August in which we discussed a game plan to kick start a change in the evaluation process in our district.  It was agreed that I would begin the process by interviewing teachers at my site in order to get a general feel about what their concerns.  The general consensus was that all teachers want to improve their teaching, but they want a meaningful evaluation process.  The teachers truly desire a professional conversation with administrators about their goals, what was observed during the classroom visits and how they can improve specific facets of their teaching.  Most did agreed that the current system is flawed in the way that administrators have to observe a large number of teachers with little time for professional discussions, just the general overview of the checklist that is utilized by the district for the observation and evaluation process.

In my next post I will detail some of the findings from other site visits.  In the meantime check out the posted resources on teacher evaluations found on this site.