Sulma+-+Teachers+Solving+the+Teacher+Evaluation+Dilemma

Session 2120

Janet Pllcher, Robin Largue, Gail Husbands; email for the report "who's engaged"

Marzano suggested to look at what Florida is doing.

Florida School Districts

Has anyone asked the teachers and what they are doing to them pertaining to evaluation. Took the top teachers/high performing and asked them what they thought about it and suggestions.

Pre-req to Teacher Evaluation is Leader Evaluation System (Student achievement, employee engagement, parent satisfaction).

educatorready.com (copy of report)

Five ALWAYS teaching actions: Procedures, Targets, Practice, Feedback, Grades

How well do you think teachers in general perform on each of them? Ask How well did my students learn today instead of how well I taught today?

Look at Effective Teacher GPA - rating oneself

We seem to be trying to do two things w/ one system - evaluating and performance growth/coaching

Definition of terms for the Focus Groups: Student Achievement: achievement scores that represented "fair growth in student learning Low Performing Teacdhers - about 8% (poor attitude and poor performance)

RESULTS:
 * Agreed that teachers w/ high performance should receive monetary rewards.
 * Did not like previous merit-pay type systems; preferred bonus pay likened the idea to the way employees in the business field receive bonuses.
 * Should be rewarded as well in creative ways - tools and equipment for classrooms, funds to attend conferences.
 * Low performing teachers should receive tough consequences leading to termination.
 * Sensed leaders knew who they were but failed to take action to remove low performers from classrooms
 * If removed, low performers were move to other schools
 * Keeping low performers in classrooms was unfair to teachers and harmful to students.
 * Did not want to work with or teach next to low performing teachers
 * Gave high performing teachers more work because leaders do not ask low performing teachers to take on extra work
 * Student achievement needs to be defined as student gwoth and included in evaluations
 * Any measure should be consistently and fairly applied to keep leaders from manipulating the system to get better school grades
 * Progress monitoring and growth throughout the year on benchmarks
 * Parent Satisfaction should be included but at school level not teacher level
 * Not opposed student input w/ appropriate tool being used
 * Observation - see them as useful for providing feedback to teachers on how to improve performance
 * Elementary group wanted Principals doing observations
 * Middle/Secondary wanted peers doing obs
 * Wanted evils to reflect the leadership roles they take on
 * System Consideration: aligned to school student achievement goals, leaders to apply plan w/ consistency, plan to maintain flexible component for changes that occur during the school year.

Evaluation Tool: 100% weights; Scales - 5 point (Audacious Goal, Stretch Goal, Meet Goal, Stay the same/No Improvement, Below Goal)

factors to include: student achievement, parent satisfaction (overall school goal), student input, observation, leadership (w/ quality of work rubric).

Union - wants to put student evals into the evaluation.

**Reflection:** This was a great session with rich discussion on pay for performance. The report is available online. Florida Governor just signed for P4P to take place by 2013. They are now going to start designing this system. There focus group results is skewed as they only had a sample size of 11 and these were the top performers. However, the results I would say are align w/ our feedback from education staff. I am surprised that they would prefer bonus as opposed to salary increase. As Phyllis has identified in ST meetings - we need to go back to the goal for what our performance management eval system is. For evaluation or professional development?