Using the Evaluation Process to Help Teachers Grow: Who's In the Driver's Seat?
There's an old Harry Wong saying about classroom management and pedagogy:
Whoever is doing the most work is doing the most learning.
If we want our students to work hard and learn a lot, they need to own their learning.
Do we understand this when it comes to teacher evaluations? Throughout the process, who's doing the most work—the administrator, or the teacher?
I'm not saying we need to have teachers write their own evaluations. But the precise path of reflection and professional growth is best determined by the person doing the growing, not the person writing it up.
It's obvious that we need to keep teachers in the driver's seat—but it's not easy to make it happen.
The "Big Stick" Problem
Helping teachers improve in the evaluation process is tough because real growth requires safety.
We want teachers to be in the driver's seat, but not like teenagers at the DMV.
We can't sit there silently marking boxes on a clipboard and honestly believe we're creating an environment conducive to growth.
We wear two hats as school leaders: we want to help our teachers grow and be their cheerleaders, but we also have a moral obligation to evaluate them and hold them accountable for doing an acceptable job.
In the evaluation process, there's no pretending the "evaluator hat" doesn't exist. But we can lay it aside and don the "coaching" hat.
Making the Growth Path Safe
If you have teachers who are clearly on the growth path, it's okay to reassure them that they're safe taking risks.
We can't go so far as to say, "There's no scenario in which you won't get a glowing evaluation from me this year." But we can send the message—subtly but clearly—that teachers are in charge of their own professional growth.
We can say something like: "I know this is the formal evaluation process, but I want it to be mainly about your growth. I want you to really push yourself, even if it means trying new things that don't work out."
We need to explicitly give people permission to take big risks—which is really permission to fail. Without it, teachers will never escape the competency trap. Out of fear, they'll resort to improvement theatre.
The Competency Trap and Improvement Theatre
We fear failure because we know our work matters. It's not just the personal sense of failure; it's the impact on our students that leads us to stick to the familiar.
Improvement is risky, because it involves giving up things we're good at and taking on new work we may not be good at yet. Change increases the chance of failure.
This is called the competency trap—we're good enough at what we're already doing that we resist going through the learning curve that would take our practice to the next level.
As administrators, we play a big role in determining how deep that trap is.
Ask yourself: as a rational person, would it be smart to try something new and virtually ensure you were at the bottom of your learning curve at the moment you were being evaluated?
Of course not—yet that's precisely what we ask teachers to do:
- Set a goal to try something new
- Set a date to be evaluated
- Rely on the outcome for your future employment
What's a sensible person to do?
In this environment, most people resort to improvement theatre. Instead of taking a real risk to get dramatically better through bold changes, they pretend. They take something they're already good at, make it seem ambitious and new, and go through the prescribed process.
If they play their cards right, they look like high-achieving geniuses. If not, at least they didn't do anything worse than last year. Either way, they don't get any better.
Teachers are so good at playing this game, and administrators are so complicit—because we realize the process is a joke for most teachers who are doing fine—that society is pushing back. Teachers are being judged on student test scores using shaky statistical formulas, because we've lost the public trust that we're genuinely evaluating and holding teachers accountable for improvement.
The Power of a Shared Framework
If I want to help teachers grow while wearing the coaching hat without being a pushover, my best tool is our shared instructional framework.
The framework serves as a map, so you can help navigate and ensure forward progress while letting the teacher stay in the driver's seat.
And if you have to defend a great teacher against an unfair formula based on questionable test score data? You need evidence—in the language of your evaluation framework, but simply listing items (1a, 2c, 3b) and marking them "satisfactory" or "exemplary" isn't evidence.
Evidence that holds up under scrutiny is, ultimately, an argument.
Building that argument—and keeping teachers in the driver's seat throughout the process—is what separates evaluation that drives real growth from evaluation that's just paperwork.
