Oct 14th Group 1 Post…Elaborated

I wanted to elaborated on last week’s group posts about ideas for starting out own school evaluation process.

We fist decided that students should have some sort of evaluation system for their teachers.  We all thought it was important to obtain feedback from the students who are experiencing the teacher and the lessons first hand.  Although this could be a little hard to do since students may be biased toward teachers who are easier or who let them get away with things, but if they are asked to elaborate and give specific details as to way they choose to rank their teacher a certain way, this will give some sort of further insight into how the students view the teacher.

We also thought it would be important for parents to have an opportunity to evaluate the teacher.  By sending weekly letters/updates about what is being taught in class and how their students is doing with each lesson is an easy way to encourage stronger parent involvement.  The parents can help quiz the student at home even and see how much of the information they are retaining and which areas they need more help in. 

The third suggestion we made was to have teachers evaluate the teachers who are in the grade below them.  The level that the students come into the classroom with says something about what they learned from the previous year.   If there is consistent evidence that students from one teacher are consistently scoring lower than students from another teacher, perhaps this says something about the different teaching styles.  This could be trickier to do since the students are also just getting back from summer break which is basically three months without school work, perhaps some students have parents who give their children work to do over the summer to keep their brain stimulated whereas other parents may not.

The last suggestion was that the principal could pop in unscheduled for observations throughout the year.  Keeping the observations random will increase the likelihood that the teachers aren’t “staging” their lessons for observations.  We also discussed having a day or two where parents and other teachers could come into the classroom to experience what their children do each day and what other teachers are doing in their classrooms.

All of these suggestions are relatively inexpensive, so money would not be an issue for any of these ideas.