Education

[BigRedBuster]

44 minutes ago, teachercd said:

Where is this insane idea that teachers are not getting evaluated coming from?  We are not firemen, we are evaluated all the time.

 

Informally, I am evaluated every single class period by 25 students.

My email is always open to receive questions/comments/concerns by staff, parents and students.

 

A new teacher to a building will generally have 3-5 formal evals in 9 months.  Which I can pretty much guarantee is way more than most jobs over that same time frame.  A formal teacher eval looks like this

 

1.  Submit a lesson plan

2.  Submit a time/class for evaluation

3.  Admin comes in for the length of the class

4.  Follow up meeting to discuss the evaluation

5.  Sign both copies of eval

 

My boss (bosses) can literally come into my room and sit there and watch me work, for as long as they want.  Again, I am guessing that happens to none of you non-teachers.  I bet none of you have had your boss come into your office and/or cube and sit next to you for 40 to 90 minutes, while writing things down about what you are doing.

 

 

First of all, no teacher is/should be fired because little Johnny wasn't allowed to be first in line. 

 

Second, evaluations actually very seldom result in firing of an employee.  If they are fired, that's going to happen no matter what, at some point.

 

The main reason for evaluations is to reinforce what they are doing well and suggest areas of improvement.  Then, reward teachers that deserve to be rewarded more than others.  You have a great teacher, they should be making more than the one that's just barely doing enough to keep their job.

 

So, new teachers are evaluated the first year, why not keep that going for every year after?

 

Teachers want to make more.  Most people believe good teachers should make more.  Why not have a system where that happens? 

[GSG]

9 minutes ago, BigRedBuster said:

First of all, no teacher is/should be fired because little Johnny wasn't allowed to be first in line. 

 

Second, evaluations actually very seldom result in firing of an employee.  If they are fired, that's going to happen no matter what, at some point.

 

The main reason for evaluations is to reinforce what they are doing well and suggest areas of improvement.  Then, reward teachers that deserve to be rewarded more than others.  You have a great teacher, they should be making more than the one that's just barely doing enough to keep their job.

 

So, new teachers are evaluated the first year, why not keep that going for every year after?

 

Teachers want to make more.  Most people believe good teachers should make more.  Why not have a system where that happens? 

 

Teachers are evaluated ALL the time. I don't know where you're getting this insane idea that they're not. 

 

My wife's school has a mini evaluation EVERY week. A formal evaluation once or twice a year. Three times a year if you're still in your probationary period. 

 

There's no way to create some standard evaluation to get rid of bad teachers. There's far less bad teachers than you think. Most are just burnt out from dealing with dips#!t admins that don't know what is actually going on in the classrooms (or don't care or don't have the funding to help) or a$$h@!e/lazy parents that put their parenting failures on the teachers.

[BigRedBuster]

Just realized that today, is the last day of school for my three kids.  My last to be done finishes up today with her masters in speech and language pathology.  She graduates next Saturday.

 

What an amazing ride this has been.  They have all had some great teachers, coaches, administrators along the way and we have always tried our best to make sure those people know we appreciate them.

 

This will be the first time in 23 years that we won't have a kid starting school somewhere.

[BigRedBuster]

1 minute ago, GSG said:

 

Teachers are evaluated ALL the time. I don't know where you're getting this insane idea that they're not. 

 

My wife's school has a mini evaluation EVERY week. A formal evaluation once or twice a year. Three times a year if you're still in your probationary period. 

 

There's no way to create some standard evaluation to get rid of bad teachers. There's far less bad teachers than you think. Most are just burnt out from dealing with dips#!t admins that don't know what is actually going on in the classrooms (or don't care or don't have the funding to help) or a$$h@!e/lazy parents that put their parenting failures on the teachers.

Then, why do we have teachers literally in this thread talking about how teachers shouldn't be evaluated?

[BigRedBuster]

We have gone through almost three pages of talking about all teachers being evaluated annually and this is the first time someone has said that actually happens.

[GSG]

Just now, BigRedBuster said:

Then, why do we have teachers literally in this thread talking about how teachers shouldn't be evaluated?

 

I don't think anyone here said they shouldn't be evaluated. You're the one that brought up something about your teacher friends saying that. But you seem to think the evaluations are just these checkboxes and at the end of the year they reward the good teachers and fire all the bad teachers. The good teachers don't get rewarded they just get to keep their job, there's no performance based pay increases or anything you just get your job another year. If you're in a sales position and you meet your quota you get your bonus pay, if you exceed your quota then you get a bigger bonus pay, if you don't need your quota then you don't get any bonus pay; there's nothing like that for teachers they don't get rewarded for being good at their job but everyone and their mom seems to want to hunt down and weed out all these horrible teachers. 

[BigRedBuster]

2 minutes ago, GSG said:

 

I don't think anyone here said they shouldn't be evaluated. You're the one that brought up something about your teacher friends saying that. But you seem to think the evaluations are just these checkboxes and at the end of the year they reward the good teachers and fire all the bad teachers. The good teachers don't get rewarded they just get to keep their job, there's no performance based pay increases or anything you just get your job another year. If you're in a sales position and you meet your quota you get your bonus pay, if you exceed your quota then you get a bigger bonus pay, if you don't need your quota then you don't get any bonus pay; there's nothing like that for teachers they don't get rewarded for being good at their job but everyone and their mom seems to want to hunt down and weed out all these horrible teachers. 

Which, has been the main focus of my part of the discussion here.  Why not have a system where they get evaluated and the good teachers are rewarded with higher pay raises than someone who is just doing enough to keep their job?

I've literally said this multiple times.

[GSG]

Just now, BigRedBuster said:

Which, has been the main focus of my part of the discussion here.  Why not have a system where they get evaluated and the good teachers are rewarded with higher pay raises than someone who is just doing enough to keep their job?

I've literally said this multiple times.

 

Because. There. Is. No. Way. To. Determine. That.

 

Please create this system you think is so easy to develop

[teachercd]

38 minutes ago, BigRedBuster said:

First of all, no teacher is/should be fired because little Johnny wasn't allowed to be first in line. 

 

Second, evaluations actually very seldom result in firing of an employee.  If they are fired, that's going to happen no matter what, at some point.

 

The main reason for evaluations is to reinforce what they are doing well and suggest areas of improvement.  Then, reward teachers that deserve to be rewarded more than others.  You have a great teacher, they should be making more than the one that's just barely doing enough to keep their job.

 

So, new teachers are evaluated the first year, why not keep that going for every year after?

 

Teachers want to make more.  Most people believe good teachers should make more.  Why not have a system where that happens? 

Really?

 

They are evaluated.  Every year, the first year is generally the most formal evals/observations 3-5 times during the year of formal ones and 3-5 of informal pop ins.

[BigRedBuster]

2 minutes ago, GSG said:

 

Because. There. Is. No. Way. To. Determine. That.

 

Please create this system you think is so easy to develop

Industries everywhere have this system.  It's interesting that, for some reason, teachers are just about the only profession that can't do this.  

 

a). Teachers want more pay.

b). People suggest they do what almost every other profession does so that good teachers can be rewarded with higher pay.

c).  Teachers - "you can't do that".

 

Do you at least understand why people who aren't in the teaching profession....who get evaluated and rewarded based on those evalutations...don't understand why teachers push back against it, while at the same time cry about good teachers not getting paid more?

[funhusker]

@BigRedBuster My comment was about using evaluations for pay increase.  Those need to be so complicated, I don’t see it happening.

 

You want toxic buildings, have teachers sit around and compare why one teacher got a raise and the other didn’t.  Are we going to require even more testing to show teacher effectiveness.  What does being a good shop teacher look like compared to a good math teacher?  If the kids like us and we don’t get parent complaints?  That would end terribly also.

 

Our current system actually works well like @teachercd mentioned.  Just this year my building got rid of a teacher for poor performance.  They used his evals and discussions to take away coaching positions and paired him with an extra mentor to meet with regularly.  He quickly realized he didn’t want to put in that work.

[BigRedBuster]

1 minute ago, funhusker said:

@BigRedBuster My comment was about using evaluations for pay increase.  Those need to be so complicated, I don’t see it happening.

 

You want toxic buildings, have teachers sit around and compare why one teacher got a raise and the other didn’t.  Are we going to require even more testing to show teacher effectiveness.  What does being a good shop teacher look like compared to a good math teacher?  If the kids like us and we don’t get parent complaints?  That would end terribly also.

 

Our current system actually works well like @teachercd mentioned.  Just this year my building got rid of a teacher for poor performance.  They used his evals and discussions to take away coaching positions and paired him with an extra mentor to meet with regularly.  He quickly realized he didn’t want to put in that work.

Question.

 

Do you know what a good teacher is?

[funhusker]

1 minute ago, BigRedBuster said:

Industries everywhere have this system.  It's interesting that, for some reason, teachers are just about the only profession that can't do this.  

 

a). Teachers want more pay.

b). People suggest they do what almost every other profession does so that good teachers can be rewarded with higher pay.

c).  Teachers - "you can't do that".

 

Do you at least understand why people who aren't in the teaching profession....who get evaluated and rewarded based on those evalutations...don't understand why teachers push back against it, while at the same time cry about good teachers not getting paid more?

In industry, a supervisor can actually calculate how much an employee is worth monetarily.  It is objective.

 

 

 

 

[teachercd]

8 minutes ago, BigRedBuster said:

Which, has been the main focus of my part of the discussion here.  Why not have a system where they get evaluated and the good teachers are rewarded with higher pay raises than someone who is just doing enough to keep their job?

I've literally said this multiple times.

 

 

First, you can't include the students in the evaluation process, that just would not be fair.  You can't have parents involved, that would be insane.

 

So that would leave an administrator or creating a new position of "Teacher Evaluator" , I guess that it cool but they would have to be an amazing teacher and then the hard part is how very different the teaching styles can be, so you could have two teachers teaching the same exact class in very different ways, with both classes doing great but one teacher uses a style that the Teacher Evaluator thinks is better...so that teacher gets rewarded when the results are the same.

 

It would be like two sales dudes pulling the same numbers in but the boss rewards one style over the other.

[BigRedBuster]

And...BTW....other industries have employees sit around discussing why someone got a raise and they didn't.  It's extremely frustrating as a manager.  But, it's common.  Not sure why that would be SOOOOO much more toxic in a school system.

2 minutes ago, funhusker said:

In industry, a supervisor can actually calculate how much an employee is worth monetarily.  It is objective.

 

 

 

 

Not always.  There are MANY jobs where it's difficult to measure productivity or how much that person contributes to the success of the company.