Teacher Evaluation

This paper is a summary and analysis of the book Teacher Evaluation: Six Prescriptions for Success, a compilation of approaches to evaluating effective teaching. School administrations continue to search for comprehensive tools for evaluating how well their teachers do their jobs. The six approaches presented here offer six different perspectives on the problem, each of which contributes significantly to the discussion, from emphasizing the need for ongoing staff development to analyzing the precise tasks and ways of thinking that a teacher needs to use in the classroom. None gives a comprehensive solution. Taken together, however, these six prescriptions illuminate some of the possible traps and areas of concern that school administrators face in asking how effectively their schools educate their pupils. The prescriptions were commissioned specifically to provide administrators with an objective, legally defensible way to identify and remove incompetent teachers, but they all address the much broader difficulty of assessing competence and effectiveness in the classroom.

The administration of the pseudonymous Elm Hill School dismissed Harriet Halverson, a teacher they clearly found incompetent. However, because their existing policies did not include a clear enough method for evaluating incompetence and removing teachers who did not live up to district standards, they were forced by the courts to reinstate her. To prevent this unfortunate situation from reoccurring,

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led "Judgment-Based Teacher Evaluation" and was written by W. James Popham, professor at the University of California at Los Angeles Department of Education and one of the compilers of the book as a whole. Popham argues for a distinct separation in evaluating teaching between "formative" evaluation that develops teaching skills and hones classroom technique and "summative" evaluation that attempts to measure results, reward instructional effectiveness, and remove teachers who are beyond the reach of help. He concentrates on summative evaluation, contending that this is the area that is most problematic within the educational process. He advocates a detailed evolution system which he calls J-BTE, Judgment-Based Teacher Evaluation, which admits the element of judgment in evaluating teaching performance and breaks down the process into five distinct categories which allow the separate summative evaluation team to render weighted judgments on a teacher's effectiveness. Popham's prescription openly acknowledges that all evaluations are subjective, the opinions of the human beings who are observing classes, looking at instructional materials, deciding whether or not students are actually learning things, and analyzing the underlying

Category: Psychology - T