Leave Me Alone but Judge Me Fairly — The Paradox of Teacher Evaluation
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the tension between teachers wanting professional autonomy and wanting fair evaluation — and how to resolve it.
Key Takeaways
- Both desires are legitimate - Teachers rightfully want both freedom in their practice and fair assessment of their work
- The resolution is frequent, low-stakes visits - Brief, informal classroom visits provide ongoing awareness without the pressure of formal evaluations
- Trust is built through presence - When leaders are regularly in classrooms, evaluations feel like a natural extension of the relationship rather than a gotcha event
Transcript
Hardly anybody enjoys being observed or evaluated, and I don't think any teacher wants to invite more scrutiny of their practice on kind of an unsolicited basis where, you know, your practice is poked and prodded and scored and you get more forms filled out about you, you get people coming in at all different times.
I think we're all right to want a little bit of breathing room to be left alone a little bit to do our jobs.
But there's a little bit of a paradox around instructional leadership and classroom walkthroughs.
And over the last 10 years, I've been trying to help administrators see through that paradox and resolve it in a way that's productive and in a way that teachers don't resent.
Because here's the paradox.
when you avoid getting into classrooms in order to kind of leave people alone, give people space, not bother them, not harass them, then you end up having to make evaluation decisions at the end of the year based on very, very little information.
And that causes two problems.
First, it makes the evaluation decision itself difficult, right?
Like I'm going to evaluate this person's entire practice in all these different domains, all these different components based on just one or two formal observations.
That is a difficult decision to make well.
It's very, very difficult to just make that kind of decision with so little evidence.
The second thing that happens is that that one observation becomes incredibly high stakes, right?
If you only have one chance to put on a good show for your principal, Well, man, that is stressful.
That is, you know, everything is on the line and it's just not the optimal way to be evaluated, right?
I believe that teacher evaluation evaluates teacher performance, not just at the lesson level.
Like this is not lesson evaluation.
If you look at the Danielson framework, it does not say this is a lesson evaluation rubric.
It is a practice rubric.
framework describing practice for the entire school year.
So we get a lot of problems when we try to evaluate the entire school year, your entire practice as a professional from just one observation.
But the paradox is if we want to do that better and not make people feel like it's super high stakes and not make people feel like it's super stressful and not make people feel harassed by this whole process, well, then we have to do something more often.
And I think what's being done in districts like HISD in Houston, where every single observation is high stakes, and there are a lot of them, everything is scored, it's very punitive.
Well, that's kind of the worst of both worlds.
But I think we can get the best of both worlds as administrators by getting into classrooms frequently, but in a low stakes way.
So I talk about that a lot in my book, Now We're Talking 21 Days to High Performance Instructional Leadership.
I think that's the number one book on classroom walkthroughs.
And what you'll see in that book is that it is intended to be a low stakes approach, right?
We're not trying to score things.
We're not trying to get a number.
We're there to learn and to get a sense of each person's practice and figure out what each person needs to improve.
And that may be feedback.
That may not be feedback.
That may be school-wide professional development.
It may be that we need to adjust our pacing on different initiatives as a result.
I believe that as leaders, we learn as much about our own work and what we need to do when we get into classrooms as we do about the teacher's practice and what the teacher might need to do differently.
So I think we've got to really look at teacher evaluation differently, not as this high stakes thing that you just do all at once at the end of the year in a formal observation, and then squeeze it for all it's worth and try to get way too much evidence out of it that just may not be there i think we've got to lower the stakes by getting into classrooms more often and the kinds of questions that we ask when we get into classrooms in that way matter i've got 10 of them here you can go to principalcenter.com feedback and download these 10 questions but they're designed to get teachers talking about their practice in a way that doesn't lend itself to giving a score, but leads to a really, really good conversation.
Like the first one is, I noticed that you blank.
Share a little bit of what you noticed.
Could you talk to me about how that fits within this lesson or unit?
When we stop acting like we know everything and can evaluate it based on five minutes or evaluate a teacher's whole practice based on one hour out of a year, And we start to listen and let people talk, let people think out loud and describe what they're doing and fill in that context that we don't necessarily get from observation alone.
We learn so much more.
So principalcenter.com slash feedback if you want to download those questions.