Evaluations and Teachers

               In class on Wednesday, Dr. Glassman addressed us with a few questions about teacher evaluations and about teachers themselves. The first question he asked us was whether teacher evaluations should be prescriptive or descriptive. Prescriptive evaluations would consist of breaking down the evaluation and telling a teacher how to improve teaching in their classrooms. Descriptive evaluations consist of taking the evaluations of teachers and deciding whether a teacher is effective or not. We continued to go through every group idea of an effective teacher evaluation. Most of us created evaluations that mainly consisted of descriptive evaluations, with only few ideas consisting of prescriptive evaluations. Is there a right way to categorize evaluations? Should they be completely prescriptive or completely descriptive? In my personal opinion, I think there needs to be a fine line between the both of them. We watched the video on the new OTES evaluations, and those evaluations consist of evaluating teachers and giving them a result of four choices, starting at being an effective teacher and ending at being an ineffective teacher. Well what are we going to do about the ineffective teachers? There should be evaluations that do describe how teachers are doing, but there should be some form of prescriptive evaluation so those teachers who are ineffective have ways to improve. As we discussed in class yesterday, good teachers are lifelong learners, so even those teachers who are labeled as “effective” may like to have some comments or ideas on how to improve or expand their teaching. However, do teachers always want to be told how to do their job? No, and as a future educator I am going to have to test the waters a little bit before I know what is working in the classroom and what is not. This is why descriptive and prescriptive evaluations should be merged. This would allow teachers to have a chance to know how they are doing by testing their own waters, but also explain how they can improve in what they are doing.

                We were also asked by Dr. Glassman whether teachers are made or teachers are born. Of course everyone holds their own opinion on this, and either answer may be correct. I found an article at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/head-the-class/201110/great-teachers-born-or-made that talks about how psychologists have been studying to find what makes a great teacher. Sure, some of us may be “born” to be teachers. Some people are more apt to work better with children than others, and perhaps that is something that we are born with. But this article highlights how teachers can become master teachers with skills that need to be made, not necessarily what we are born with. Some ideas this article has on how to make a great teacher is by keeping the information current, being enthusiastic about what they teach, self-monitoring their own teaching, taking risks in the classroom, making the learning fun for students, encouraging the children to solve problems on their own, setting high standards, and showing that they are caring for others in how they teach. Although our desires to be teachers may not be entirely innate, we can also make our own efforts to become master teachers.