You Can't Evaluate Someone You've Never Observed
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that outsourcing teacher evaluation to people who've never set foot in the classroom is absurd.
Key Takeaways
- Evaluation requires observation - You can't assess teaching quality without actually watching someone teach
- Outsourcing is a cop-out - Hiring external evaluators who don't know the teachers or context produces meaningless results
- Be in classrooms - Principals who want to evaluate fairly must make regular classroom visits a priority
Transcript
This is the worst instructional leadership idea I've seen in a long time.
This person is apparently trying to start a business where you send them your teacher observation notes and they send you back a written evaluation with a rating according to the Danielson framework.
And there's so much wrong with this idea that I just had to say something.
And I was like, not super nice in my reply to this person.
Because this is like borderline evil to do as a leader.
To be responsible legally for evaluating somebody's performance as a teacher.
And then to outsource that responsibility to someone who does not know that teacher.
Who has never observed that teacher.
Who has never visited that teacher's classroom.
Who has never...
seen their students at work, who has never looked at student work.
The idea that you could take everything that teaching is and condense it down into observation notes, or what this person calls observation data, and then do any kind of meaningful or valid evaluation based on so little information, I think is just gross.
Like, I'm just very disappointed in our profession that anyone would even think this is an appropriate thing to do because formal observations are so difficult anyway.
There's such a narrow slice of everything that teachers do.
There's such a small amount of information to answer such big picture questions about how someone is doing with all of their students over the course of the entire year in every domain and every component of practice.
It's a lot.
And this is my area of expertise on teacher evaluation, classroom walkthroughs, things like that.
So I feel very, very strongly that if we're going to evaluate teachers, we have to take full responsibility for that as leaders.
And it's not enough to do formal observations.
It's not enough to just show up once a year and do the big write-up and then evaluate teachers based on that.
I believe we need to do a lot more.
We need to be paying attention in every setting, in meetings and in conferences and discussions with teachers about their practice.
We need to be looking at student work.
We need to be doing so much other than paying attention This idea that teacher evaluation is just paperwork and like ChatGPT can do it for you or some outsourced, you know, vendor can do it for you is just like, it's just a deep misunderstanding of what teaching is and how teaching can really be assessed and improved and scored.
So I like the Danielson framework.
I think it is very valuable for talking about practice.
But if you don't talk, if you just use it to score, something goes very very wrong let me know what you think