Evaluating educator evaluations...

Teacher and administrator evaluations...surely a topic that will garner the attention of all educators!

Yesterday I was sitting in my Advanced School Law class and we started discussing teacher evaluations as they pertain to contract renewals and dismissals. As my professor continued the discussion, I started to hear some great "tweetable" statements. For those of you in the Twitterverse, you know how great it is to hear "tweetable" statements while listening to a presentation or a discussion...needless to say, I went to work.

Within a few short moments the back channel tweeting had come alive, and before I knew it I was in the middle of a conversation with @Akevy613, @L_Hilt, @skulpa, @pete_rodrigues and @davidwees.

Now, one of two things happened here...either people really just love having conversations with me on Twitter (not likely), or people have really strong feelings about educator evaluations and how we can work to improve them. I'm going to go with option # 2...

Here are a few things I took away from our great conversation:

- The evaluator should be focusing on what the students are learning, not just how the teacher is teaching...

- Teacher evaluations should be about reflection and learning...not about paperwork and protocol...

- A negative teacher evaluation is not negative if it is helping to get the best educators for kids...

- We need shorter, more frequent observations with less formulaic write ups...cut and paste doesn't work...

- Our students deserve the best teachers possible...this should be our # 1 priority when talking about teacher evaluations...

- Evaluations are not about punishing teachers...they are about helping teachers to increase student success...

- We need to streamline the evaluation process so we can spend more time discussing and reflecting...

Please share what you are doing at your school and in your district as it pertains to educator evaluations...both for teachers and administrators. Additionally, how do you think we can improve the evaluation process so we are focusing on educator growth and development...?