80s48 Evaluator Training

Legislation in the late 1980s mandated that all administrators in Iowa take an evaluator training course. Part of the rational was that there were incompetent teachers in the system and administrators were not doing anything about it. The Department of Education along with the School Administrators of Iowa designed the course with help from some professors at Iowa State.

I took the course with about 30 others. Most of those in attendance were already principals or superintendents. An administrator from a nearby district came to the high school library and taught the class. It lasted several evenings and had required attendance.

I was amazed by the cavalier attitude of many of the participants and the contempt they seemed to have for teachers in general. It made me wonder why many of these people were in education.

The course focused on what had been determined to be the effective elements of teacher evaluation. We watched videos, read and took notes as the course progressed.

The first element of teacher evaluation is the pre-observation conference. It takes place prior to the teacher observation. It is an opportunity for the teacher to give the evaluator an overview of what they will be seeing, answer any questions and agree on a focus for the observation.

The second part is the actual observation. We learned different ways of gathering data. The most common one was scripting. That was writing down every thing the teacher said. Another one just focused on the questions the teacher asked. What kind of questions were they asking? Did the teacher wait for a response, etc. Other times the observer might focus on the pattern the teacher used in calling on students. Do they call on one side of the room more than the other? Front more than back? Males more than females?

The observation was followed by some time for the observer to gather their notes and write up a summary document of some type. Then there is the post-observation conference when the evaluator shares their observations and conclusions with the teacher. The teacher is given a chance to respond and then both sign off on the document.

We watched video after video of teachers and scripted their words. It was tiring but over time I got better at it and could abbreviate a lot. Each person develops his or her own code.

Some of the participants openly made fun of the teachers in the videos and by their comments it was clear to me that some of them didn’t know what good teaching was. They seemed to like only the ones who taught the way they did and, from what I could observe, they must not have been very good teachers themselves. When I thought of some of the teachers they supervised it became clear to me why such incompetence was allowed to exist in education. Bad teachers become bad administrators and don’t really know what good instruction is so they couldn’t possibly evaluate effectively.

I finished in the top two or three in the class and was invited to take the follow-up training to be an instructor for the course. I did it because I really wanted to influence the way administrators did teacher observation.

You are nothing if not a story. It is up to you how good that story is.