Words and Letters: Evaluation
This afternoon, after an extremely harried day, I participated in an Educational Policy Committee meeting to discuss Charlotte Danielson’s four domains of teacher evaluation. Having arrived 15 minutes late from another obligation, I was just getting up to speed with the concept of “Evidence of Teaching” as being Unsatisfactory, Basic, Proficient, or Distinguished when my cell phone rang. My gracious colleagues looked on with quiet amusement as I awkwardly moved outside the room to accept the call and silence the intrusion.
My irritation and embarrassment for not having muted my phone and rather abrupt “hello” were met with the animated voice of my eight year old son. “Hey, dad, hope you’re not busy but I just wanted to call and tell you about what happened at my school today. My teacher showed me my report card and guess what? No D’s or F’s! That means I’m doing good, right?”
The all-important meeting all but forgotten, we spent the next 10 minutes talking about how proud I was of his progress. Like all children, my son has academic strengths and struggles, and as a parent I only ask that he give his best effort. And as a parent who spends time at the kitchen table every night helping him study and complete his homework, I can attest to the fact that he does.
When I rejoined my meeting and heard more about the necessity to clearly articulate the varying degrees of teacher performance, I couldn’t help but compare student letter grades and faculty domain rubrics. Does a teacher equate an evaluation of “Basic” to that of a “C”? Does a “C student” consider himself as being “basic” in terms of his knowledge and skills? Is there irony in that we spend considerable time and verbiage helping adults understand the terminology of evaluation but leave student assessment to be expressed with and interpreted from a single letter from the English alphabet? Perhaps my grasp of the situation isn’t quite “Proficient”….
January 25th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Reading these posts in reverse order (I’m a few days behind now), I can’t help but notice the connection of this question with the one regarding formative and summative assessments. Why is there a tremendous emphasis — in class and in the grade — on summative assessments only? It seems counter-intuitive to emphasize the end product as the pinnacle of learning and understanding, when in fact all the formative assessments leading up to that point are the foundation for understanding and represent the greater amount of time spent in class. Additionally, at a school that prides itself on reaching and challenging each individual child, can we assign a student a C “average understanding grade” which, in many cases, is just a comparison to his/her classmates’ abilities and performances? In many cases, the students who earn a C in my math class are the students who have struggled always in math or are the students coming from different programs and therefore have more ground to cover in terms of skills and conceptual understanding. The students earning C’s in that situation have an average understanding of the current content because they are still trying to build the foundation that my A students built previously and continue to reinforce daily.
These two posts address fundamental questions about what we are as a school and who we are as teachers and professional in that school, and what do we say we value as opposed what we really show that we value in our day-to-day interactions with students and each other.