More Than Just Evaluation

Your principal walks into the room while you are teaching.
Here are some of the possibilities that go through your head while you continue to teach:
• Does she need one of the students for something?
• Does she need me for something?
• Is this just a quick 1-minute pop-in visit?
• Is this one of those 20-minute long "informal observations" that is actually formal ... because there are going to be forms involved?
• What am I supposed to be teaching right now?

I recently finished Tony Frontier & Paul Mielke's new book Making Teachers Better, Not Bitter (ASCD, 2016).  The title speaks for itself: are you developing processes that grow teacher expertise, or are you just developing processes?

The authors contend that evaluation, supervision, and reflection are three sides of a triangle that build teacher expertise.  All three are necessary if growth is your expected outcome, but pull on one side of the triangle too hard, and the entire system gets out of balance.  This is what happens when we put all our eggs in the "evaluation" basket - we end up with bitterness instead of betterment.

Frontier & Mielke clearly define their three components and offer protocols that can be implemented to improve practice in each area.  Evaluation is what you'd expect it to be - valid and reliable rating of performance - which is what teachers hopefully do with student work at the end of a term.  The problem is that most teachers (and principals?) do not know when the administrator is functioning as an "evaluator" and when he/she is functioning in a different capacity.  Was that walk-through part of an evaluation or something else?  Was that quick hallway conversation about what was seen in your room an evaluatory or a coaching conversation?  Trust is built upon transparency.

System out of balance

Supervision means the way a supervisor "creates conditions for teachers to uncover and close the gap between their current performance and the next level of performance" (72).  The authors make an analogy between evaluation and supervision this way:
   • Evaluation is the state accountability assessment
   • Supervision is the curriculum that students engage in order to do well on the state assessment
What conditions does the principal create between evaluation cycles in order that growth might occur and expertise develop?  This takes trust, feedback, and deep knowledge of the chosen teaching framework (Danielson, Stronge, Marzano, etc.) by both the supervisor and the teacher.

Reflection seems self-explanatory, but the bigger question the authors offer is this: "When everyone reflects in a different way, how do you leverage reflection for school-wide improvement?" Reflection is about creating an internal dialog that drives your own improvement, and it is perhaps the biggest motivator of continuous improvement towards expertise.

The question we must ask ourselves as educators and leaders is this:
Are we trying to measure effectiveness or are we trying to improve effectiveness (160)?
There is a time and a place for measuring effectiveness - that's what evaluation seeks to do.
But if we are trying to improve effectiveness, we need the other two sides of the triangle - supervision and reflection - to create conditions that will drive true growth.