Wednesday, June 3, 2009

The Widget Effect: Teacher Evaluation

Across the United States, the school year has ended or will end soon. Field days, graduation ceremonies, cumulative folders, final report cards, and summative teacher evaluation conferences mark the end of the school year along with a host of other activities. Unfortunately, teacher evaluation in many systems is a “check the box” event as opposed to a process.

On Monday (6/1/09), The New Teacher Project released The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness in which the teacher evaluation practices in 12 school districts in four states (AR, CO, IL, OH) were examined. Over 15,000 teachers and 1200 administrators were surveyed. Documents were analyzed and 130 interviews were conducted. The school districts ranged in size from serving 4,450 students to 413,700 students. The Widget Effect “describes the tendency of school districts to assume classroom effectiveness is the same from teacher to teacher. This decades-old fallacy fosters an environment in which teachers cease to be understood as individual professionals, but rather as interchangeable parts” (p. 4).

Teachers are you treated as Widgets? Administrators, does the evaluation system you use suffer from the Widget Effect? Common characteristics of the Widget Effect are:

  • All teachers are rated good or great. In evaluation systems with satisfactory, unsatisfactory, and not applicable choices for each item, most teachers are going to be rated satisfactory as bar for unsatisfactory is too low and/or required documented effort of work to address teacher weaknesses during the year raised performance just above unsatisfactory, but there is no middle ground. In systems with multiple ratings, the report found that 91% of teachers received the top two ratings and less than 1% were rated unsatisfactory. An behaviorally-anchored performance rating scale for each performance standard that defines what performance for each level looks like and consists of is one way to increase the use of ratings that do discriminate between great, good, needs improvement/developing, and unsatisfactory performance.
  • Excellence goes unrecognized. In many school systems, an effective teacher who gets gains with students, but only has four years of teaching experience makes less money than the 15-year mediocre teacher in the next classroom. While many school systems have a teacher of the year program, this only recognizes one “great” teacher while many more dedicated an effective teachers go unrecognized for their work. Often evaluation systems perpetuate this problem by failing to acknowledge excellence when it exists in areas such as instructional delivery, planning, assessment, classroom management, and content knowledge, professionalism, and student interactions.
  • Inadequate professional development. Often teacher evaluation is disconnected from professional development. Seventy-three percent of teachers surveyed in this report said that their most recent evaluation did not identify areas for professional growth.
  • No special attention to novices. Teacher evaluation systems that treat everyone the same are failing to acknowledge that new to the profession teachers benefit from additional support during their first few years in the classroom.
  • Poor performance goes unaddressed. The majority of administrators (81%) and teachers (58%) surveyed indicated that there was a poor performing teacher in their school. Further 43% of the teachers indicated that the teacher’s performance warranted dismissal.

The report offers four recommendations for addressing and reversing the Widget Effect. Better teacher evaluation is a component. A more difficult challenge is changing the mindset of people who say that teacher quality matter, but do little to recognize, promote, and improve effectiveness. The recommendations are:

  1. Have a comprehensive teacher evaluation system that provides a means to rate teacher performance according to factors associated with effective teaching. The evaluation should be linked to professional development. Teachers should receive frequent feedback.
  2. Evaluators need to know how to use and use the evaluation system effectively. Training needs to be provided so that the system is implemented in a fair, legal, useful, and consistent manner.
  3. Teacher evaluation needs to be linked to critical policy and action items within the school system (e.g., teacher hiring, compensation, reduction-in-force, dismissal).
  4. Have dismissal policies that “provide lower-stakes options for ineffective teachers to exit the district and a system of due process that is fair but efficient” (p.8). This report recommendation may have state law implications as some states have codified the process for dismissal.

    NOTE: the green text is directly taken from page 6 of the report.

No comments:

Post a Comment

 

Web Counter