Teacher Evaluations
The other day, my husband and I were talking about teacher evaluations and all the expectations and accountability that are placed on teachers.
His perspective is from the business world and being a manager/administrator who did annual “reviews” of his employees.
First of all, they called them “reviews”, which is perhaps more appealing than “evaluations”.
Evaluation = from the Latin valere meaning to be of value or worth.
Instead of reviewing or taking another view(point) or look at the person’s performance over the past year with the intention of deciding what went well and what needs to change (plus-delta approach)…
…it seems that what administrators are being asked to do is determine what “value” to place on a teacher or decide what that teacher is “worth”.
I prefer a different model for reviewing or evaluating people’s participation and performance in an event called the “plus-delta” approach.
Technically, the “plus-delta” model was designed and developed by the aviation and medical industries as a debriefing system for meetings, simulations and practices.
This approach uses more “improvement” oriented language rather than language that may be considered too negative, judgmental and discouraging.
How could the delta-plus model be better implemented in education, especially for teacher evaluations?
