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?
This is how the plus-delta model works:
Once I learned about this model, I embraced it and started to use it for so many things.
I used it to guide me during the National Board Certification process.
I used it for parent conferences.
I used it for Board meetings with professional organizations.
I used it in the classroom with students.
I used it to mentor new teachers.
I used it for every situation that required reflection and continuous improvement.
Hmmmm….maybe it can be used for just about every situation in life, both in and out of the classroom.
We are not perfect, and as human beings, we can only seek to keep learning and growing in our knowledge, skills, choices and actions in life.
Focusing on the negative, the mistakes, the perceived failures, the “less than” and “not enough” aspects of ourselves just keeps us stuck there with feelings of frustration, overwhelm and sometimes even hopelessness.
Most teacher evaluations today are based on Marzano and Danielson. These names have become almost dreaded by most teachers because they see these teacher evaluation models as really just a checklist of “gotchas” and what teachers are NOT doing rather than what they are doing.
There really is no room for true self-reflection and empowerment on the part of the teacher either.
In one of my early Teacher Tales podcasts #4, my guest (and friend), Norah talks about the most powerful thing that her first administrator did for her as a teacher.
Check it out here:
Norah said that after her first administrator visited her classroom to “evaluate” her, she thought about how things didn’t go perfectly and started focusing in on her defense and even beating herself up a bit about it.
Well, much to her surprise, the kind and caring administrator asked Norah what she thought went well with the lesson, and THEN, asked her what she would have done differently or would do to change the lesson and make it even better.
That was a kind of “plus-delta” approach with positive, improvement-focused language that encouraged and empowered Norah to reflect and decide what worked well and wanted to keep doing and what she wanted to improve.
I wish more administrators would adopt this approach.
I wish more teachers would adopt this approach with their students.
Shoot, I wish we would take this approach more in every aspect of life…with ourselves and with others.
What a wonderful world this would be then? Am I right, Louis Armstrong?
Image credit:
“Debrief – plus delta from the workshop” by Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
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