What is most important?
In our school system, I would say that our work is evaluated in the following ways:
- Does our work help the evaluators? People who appear to help the evaluators seem to be recognized more than those that challenge the evaluators. This makes sense, but is it right? That's something to ponder.
- Does our work result in optimal test scores? It seems that this is one tangible that evaluators hold on to when it comes to evaluating individual's work. This can be both good and bad because the way you use and analyze assessment results matters a lot--the analysis must be honest and right-directed to be a good evaluative tool.
- Do you contribute or take away from an organization? This is a bit vague, but in general someone who is a contributor generally gets a better evaluation than someone who takes away? How is that rightly evaluated?
As I think about this, I am thinking about how I evaluate my own work. I evaluate it with the following parameters:
- Is the teaching/learning program at the grade-level developing in a positive way with "positive way" marked by family investment, student engagement, meeting state and system expectations, representing new research, and building a positive team.
- Are children making progress as noted with their daily work via observations, assessments, conversation, family-student-teacher meetings?
- Is the teaching/learning environment a warm, welcoming place? Do children feel at home? Are they coming to school, and are they enthusiastic about school?
In the year ahead, as I think about my work, I will evaluate my work based on the following efforts:
- Creation of a physical science lab book to lead students through the study of expected study and review physical science standards.
- Creation of a STEAM Survival Guide to lead students through our grade-level STEAM projects including the academic points related to the activities.
- Updating the physical science, environmental science, STEAM, math, and Learning to Learn websites with the best resources, tools, and information to lead these efforts in 2019-2020.
- Continuing to work with grade-level colleagues to develop a top-notch fifth grade program that invites colleagues and families to work with us to create and promote a successful teaching learning team.
- Continuing to develop my repertoire for teaching science with more lessons, greater engagement, more real-world connections, and a greater interdisciplinary focus.
- Continuing to develop my repertoire for teaching math by adding more targeted extra help sessions during the day, before school, or after school and my reviewing the scope and sequence to highlight the most engaging, successful learning experiences/projects, and retire lessons and other efforts that proved to be less successful.
- Analyzing assessment data thoroughly to look for patterns, deficits, and strengths of the program and building upon that analysis.
- Integrating the "Learning to Learn"website and resources with academic efforts to build a positive, proactive, and collaborative learning team of students, families, and colleagues.
- Making good decisions about how to get involved beyond the grade-level and utilizing positive advocacy to work for those matters that I believe will improve schools including greater transparency, better communication, teacher leadership/voice/choice, apt processes for decision making, and modern, positive professional learning.
In many cases, educators are their own leaders. This is due, in large part, to the way systems are structured in schools. Of course, I would like to remake school structure to represent a more distributive hierarchy that provides greater skilled collaborative coaching, decision making processes, and recognizable growth and development based on communal goals, vision, and mission. The better the organizations are structured and promoted, the better our success will be in preparing young children to live positive, good lives.
