Making Teachers Better, Not Bitter: Balancing Evaluation, Supervision, and Reflection for Professional Growth

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. Paul Mielke. Paul is superintendent of the Hamilton School District in Sussex, Wisconsin, and he teaches leadership and teacher evaluation courses at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee. And he's the author with Tony Frontier of Making Teachers Better, Not Bitter, Balancing Evaluation, Supervision, and Reflection for Professional Growth.

[00:41] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:43] SPEAKER_01:

Paul, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Well, let's talk first about that title a little bit. Why do you think it is that in our profession, teacher evaluation has a little bit of a reputation for leaving a bad taste in people's mouths, for not really adding value to the relationship between a teacher and that teacher's supervisor, not adding value to that teacher's professional growth? How do you think we got to where we are with teacher evaluation and the baggage that's attached to it?

[01:13] SPEAKER_02:

It's interesting that you started there. A couple of years ago, I was at a evaluation meeting where you were laying out to teachers all the deadlines that they had to turn in certain forms and to make sure that they were turning in certain forms for their pre-observation, their observation, make sure they had the reflection forms in that they were doing. And it was all these things that were going on. And a teacher looked at me and she said, this process isn't making me better. It's making me better. And it really made you think we would never teach a class that way.

[01:45]

You would never sit in front of a group of kids and give them something and say, by the way, here's something I'm going to come in and watch you in class one day. And then at the end of the year, I'm going to give you some feedback and let you know if you're okay or not. We would never teach a student that way. So why would we handle our professional development that way? And I think teachers really just saw it as not really about getting better it was a way to check off on the list and I think one of the main components that Dr. Frontier and I talk about in the book is really teacher evaluation is really about compliance are you good enough so that you know people basically leave you alone and you can go about your day versus that's a lot different in the book we talk about actually creating a culture of expertise and how do we create something where we want to become an expert where everyone can get better and continue to get better

[02:37]

I think when you look at teacher evaluation, one of the biggest issues is that the only people that ever go on an improvement plan are the people that need help or that are almost one foot out the door and are practically being fired. And that doesn't send a great message to our staff where if they admit that they're not I need to get better here. I need to get better there. It's really hard for them to do that when in the traditional sense, if they do do that, it's basically a red flag to say, hey, look, I'm not good enough to be here. So I think when you put all this together, it's about checking off forms and it's not really about making it meaningful for them. And I think teachers really To sum it up in one sentence, they didn't find the meaning of doing all the work and it really became about justification of their practice and that's it.

[03:24] SPEAKER_01:

And if we were kind of imagining a different world where we had a teacher evaluation process that we could use if we had an underperforming teacher who really did need to kind of be shown the door. and that was it, I think we'd be talking about something else. But in the world that we live in, teacher evaluation is a very big deal for everyone. It's very time-consuming for teachers to go through the process, to fill out the forms, to set the goals, to have the meetings. It's extremely time-consuming for supervisors, for central office staff who support them in that process. A ton of effort goes into this, so it's not really true that it's just a process for dealing with a very tiny fraction of our students professional workforce here.

[04:05]

And I like that idea of balance. And in the book, you talk about balancing three factors, balancing evaluation, supervision, and reflection. How did you come to that set of three factors that we need to balance in the process?

[04:20] SPEAKER_02:

I think in just the work that Tony and I did, we separately did our work and did some things and kept coming back as we had conversations to the same things. And when you look at it, Again, if we use the analogy to kids, you just don't test kids to get them better testing, more testing and more testing doesn't make kids smarter. It's what you do before that. So we looked at summative versus formative assessments and how can we do summative feedback, which an evaluation is and balance that with formative and really found that the reflection piece was really missing when people took ownership and went back and looked at themselves and And conscience were metacognitive in their teaching at the instructional practice level and said, hey, I'm going to get better at this and use deliberate practice to go do those things and engaged in a process like that. They got much better.

[05:11]

And I think a really easy analogy to think about that we use in the book is if you think about golf, evaluation is a tool. And it can't be used to help teachers grow and to evaluate them. And it's really used, should be used for evaluation, saying this is where they currently stand. So in golf, you have a driver and an iron and a putter, and you use all those for very different purposes. If you had the world's best and most expensive driver and you tried to use it to putt, it wouldn't be effective. And I think what we argue in the book is much the same way as find the proper tool for the proper job.

[05:46]

And just when we've asked teachers, other people to simply define what do you use your evaluation for? What do you use supervision for? And what do you use reflection for? They usually have an answer for evaluation. Some have an answer for supervision, though they usually call supervision and evaluation the same thing. But many don't have a systematic way to have reflection when reflection actually is probably the biggest lever you have to move people.

[06:10]

So I think one of the things in the book that challenges people to think about reflection in a different manner than it has been before. Many times if you talk to teachers and you say, how do you reflect? All of them will say, yes, they reflect, but they'll be very different in how they do it. Some do it in the car on the way home. Some make little notes in a planning book. Some talk with one another over the weekend on coffee about it.

[06:32]

But it's not very systematic. And if you can find a systematic way to do it. reflection part of it and combine it with the other two pieces you can really have some different tools to help people to match their different needs that they have so that you really can move them along the continuum and help them become a much better teacher well when i think about reflection and the teacher evaluation process i usually think about you know the the mandatory paragraph that the the teacher adds that we kind of paste in at the end of the document

[07:00] SPEAKER_01:

Help us frame a better vision for reflection. If we want reflection to really be a resource and a practice that really helps teachers grow, that helps them improve on an ongoing basis, not just a paragraph that they write when we need to fill out a document. Help us think about that in a different way. What does reflection really mean?

[07:21] SPEAKER_02:

I think one thing that you need to think about where you start is in order to make it meaningful and make it more practical... is start back with the teaching framework that the district has. And if you look at the framework, we often have teachers go ahead and look at the framework that's in front of them, right? It's the teaching rubric.

[07:40]

Just like you have a, before you gave a big project to a student, you'd have that rubric in front of them, have them go through the rubric so they completely understood all the pieces and parts that they should do for the project. So we start there and then we ask them, And this is where things start to get a little bit different. It's instead of having a general goal like, oh, I'm going to get better at teaching reading or I'm going to get better at student engagement. We ask people to actually pinpoint instructional practices. And that's where the big difference, first of all, starts. And first of all, we have the teachers do it themselves.

[08:11]

So it's not a principal or an administrator walking in and saying you need to do it on this. It's here's all the things you need to do. Let's focus on two or three of these. Because a lot of our work is actually grounded in expertise. And if you read the work on expertise, it's about defining very specific subsets or skills at the instructional level for teaching and practicing those and getting really good at those. And if you look at the whole framework, there's probably 50 to 75 different instructional strategies that you'd have to be really good at to be an expert.

[08:43]

The research on expertise says it's typically a 10 year journey for someone to become an expert from when they start in their profession. So when you look at some of the teaching practices, if you can get really good at two to three every year and continue to build upon those and build upon those over the course of 10 years, you also all of a sudden have this very vast toolbox that allows you to really be an expert in your field at teaching. So the different way we look at reflection is, first of all, tying it back to a framework to give it some some structure and then allowing the teacher the ability to really focus on what they want to focus on. Now, sometimes it always doesn't work. Sometimes you have to step in as a supervisor and lead the conversation a little bit and move them a little bit if you see a different need. But 80, 90 percent of the time, teachers do a really good job.

[09:32]

They know what they need to do in order to get better. So once they define that area of this is the instructional practice I'm going to work on. So maybe it's using analogies, right? to introduce content at the beginning of new content knowledge or new course knowledge. So when you're talking about that, then you're looking at, hey, every time I'm going to introduce something new, I'm going to make sure my analogies really make sense. Or you can pick any other instructional strategies.

[09:59]

And that's why the Marzano framework is really good at that because it pinpoints different strategies we can use. So we often use that as a resource to find different strategies for people to work on. They go ahead and work on those, and that's when they're getting very direct feedback. So when they watch a video of somebody else teaching, they're looking for those things. If we have them go in and walk into another classroom and watch somebody else teach, then they're looking for those specific things. And I think the one thing with reflection is a lot of schools, when you go to them and say, well, yeah, I let my teachers go into any classrooms they want and see what the other teachers are doing because it's good practice and they're really good at this.

[10:37]

But if you're asking a teacher who doesn't really do observation, walk into a classroom and don't have a specific focus on what they're looking for, they're going to look at 35 different things. Imagine a principal, as you probably can relate, your first couple of observations are much different than after you've had time to practice that skill and get good at it. have when you're asking teachers to get better and look at videos or visit other people so they can get better ideas you really need to be specific and narrow down what they're looking at for two or three things so they can focus on those things and get feedback and get better so i think reflection looks a little bit different there it's much more systematic it's very specific it's very teacher driven and it's a way to just focus on those two or three skills at the instructional level. And that makes a huge difference in the conversations that people have and then how they're able to move their practice forward.

[11:29] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I appreciate your focus there on practices, because if you look at a framework like Danielson's, which I think is a very strong framework for teacher evaluation, and it's the basis for the teacher evaluation systems in, I think, the plurality of states, if not the majority, it's not about practice alone. Specifically, it's about performance. And often what I would see when I would sit down with teachers to have what you might call a reflective conversation, teachers would look at it and would kind of think about themselves holistically and reflect on whether they were level three, level four. Am I outstanding? Am I merely satisfactory? But it didn't allow us to get into those specific instructional practices.

[12:13]

You know, you can't look at Danielson and say, well, this particular technique is what I need to work on. I need to watch some film. I need to see someone else using this practice. I need to get feedback on myself using this specific instructional technique. So to me, you're kind of distinguishing between an area of performance like we might see on a Danielson style rubric and a specific teaching technique that, as you mentioned, you know, one can develop deep expertise and skill in. Those seem like distinct areas to me.

[12:43] SPEAKER_02:

I would agree. And I think once you have an awareness of that, though, it's easy to use the Danielson model and say, look, this is the performance. And then the question is, what specific instructional strategies that I could use that would impact this area? for this standard, for this domain. And people typically don't think that way. They just think broad scale of I'm going to do engagement here or what's my classroom culture or what's my classroom management.

[13:09]

But then that's why I think the framework that we laid out works with any of the other, the Danielson or Marzano or Strong or what other models are out there because you can still have the same conversations. It's just that when you're leading those or when you ask teachers to do them, think, okay, you thought you were level three here in order to get to level four, what would you need to do? They'll identify it and then say, what specific instructional practices do you think you'd have to do to get there? and the great thing about that is sometimes they'll open the door and say, you know what, I'm not exactly sure. And then that's where you can get the classroom visit center. And also, and if you start seeing a reoccurring theme as an administrator or a instructional coach, then that's where some of the professional development pieces can come in and then you can hit your whole staff and help them all with it.

[13:53]

But, um, I absolutely agree. I think the big difference and the big change in this is talking about, um, the specificity of things. And that goes right along with the research on developing expertise and deliver practice. And, um, And goal setting and the more specific you are, the easier it is to calibrate if you are meeting or not meeting your goals and set. So there's a lot of pieces that because of the specificity will fall in line and will allow teachers to get much better.

[14:20] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I think just in terms of what I've seen coming from instructional leaders and the work that we do with teachers, I think there's a power in focusing on specific strategies, but I think we also have to be careful when it comes to the evaluation side of that. I've seen a lot of really, really skilled, very professional teachers just get hammered in the evaluation process because they're being evaluated on some practice that they weren't really using. If we go through something like Marzano or... or something like teach like a champion where we have these enormous lists of instructional practices you know and back to the idea of uh john hattie's where he says kind of everything works to some extent right that every every instructional strategy every instructional practice that you could possibly think of works to some extent right and it works to an extent that's based on your skill with it that's based on to some extent uh the the kind of fundamental limits on its effectiveness so there are some strategies that are better than others but in other cases

[15:17]

it comes down to an issue of skill. What I see and what I'm concerned about in the teacher evaluation process is that we go from helping teachers improve in the use of strategies that they are trying to improve their skills in to kind of hitting them over the head with those strategies and saying, well, you didn't do this, you didn't do that, you didn't do this, you didn't do that. And we've got these lists that are so, so long that one could not possibly use all of those techniques, all of those strategies, or all of those practices in a given lesson. So I think the aspect of teacher choice and teacher professional responsibility for their own growth really seems critical to me. How do you see that kind of picking what to focus on showing up in this process of working with teachers in reflection?

[16:03] SPEAKER_02:

I heard two pieces there. One piece I heard was kind of a caution for administrators or people who are evaluating is this isn't, it can't be a checklist approach, right? It can be I need to see four different things in a lesson and I need you to use these seven different strategies. It doesn't work that way. And I think one of the best things that came out of the Marzano work was if it's new content versus if it's practicing content versus if it's generating hypotheses, you use very different strategies in each one of those areas. And when I've just been able to break it down and talk with teachers about that, that makes a lot of sense.

[16:40]

You know, I think one of the things that, recently has been, well, you can't lecture to kids. Well, quite honestly, sometimes lecture is the best strategy to use if you use it correctly at the beginning of a content. So the definition of an expert is being able to use the right strategy at the right time in the right way. And that's one of the things that when you look at this, it's about giving the teachers the power and autonomy to say, if I work on this, this is going to have the biggest impact on what I do with kids every day. And that's the way I always phrase it. They'll say, well, what should I work on?

[17:12]

And my answer is, what's going to make it the most meaningful for you? And then how are you going to use that to make the biggest change in the work that you do with kids every day? And then all of a sudden, they have it, right? And they start to go ahead and work with that. So it can't be about the idea of strategy X leading to strategy Z. Then I think you do specific, but then when you're having those conversations with teachers, then it becomes more of a a broad, broad discussion about, about things, right?

[17:39]

So if things weren't going well and students weren't engaged, it wasn't because you need to use a specific strategy strategy. It was, you know, kids really weren't engaged when you were doing some of these things. What are some things you think you can do differently? And then that's where the strategy piece comes in. So I think it's, you're a hundred percent right. I've seen people use it the wrong way where they're trying to make it a checklist approach.

[17:59]

Teaching is too complex. And for someone to walk in and just make it a recipe. And I think when you think of all the variables that teachers deal with every day versus kids. personal lives and things are going on or their own teachers personal lives and things that are going on. Plus what's going on in school that day, what's going on that week, what's going on with the curriculum. There's so many variables that it can't be a checklist approach to it.

[18:23]

And I think as an administrator, as a supervisor, somebody who's rating them, you're rating them on the overall effectiveness, not if they did it the way you wanted them to do it, because they're with the kids every day. And if they're doing their job well, then they know what they need to do with the kids. And your goal, I think, when you're supervising or evaluating is to help support them in as many ways as possible. And when you show that you're there to support people. And I think the other big, big piece that we need to talk about, we haven't mentioned yet is a huge component of the book is we've talked about growth mindset all the time with kids. Anytime in Dweck's work has been amazing and it's really filtered into the schools, but we need to transform or transfer the work from that growth mindset idea from kids also to the teachers.

[19:09]

And, As an administrator, as a supervisor, somebody who's looking at those things, they have to know that they're okay to take chances to do things. And if things don't work out, it's what did they learn from it so that they can continue to get better because If they're worried about doing a certain strategy a certain way or getting a certain number of strategies in an hour, then they're not doing what they need to do to try to get better and we're not trusting them as a professional.

[19:33] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And you said something really important there that I want to circle back to, the idea that we're evaluating teachers on their overall effectiveness, their overall performance. And I think there's been a process put in place in a lot of school districts that's very troubling to me, where we take a very broad and very comprehensive framework, like say the Danielson rubric, and we try to turn that into an observation checklist. Or we expect that we'll be able to find evidence in the majority of those components during a single lesson. And in some cases, I'm even seeing numerical scores given to teachers right after an observation. And I'm saying, you know, that is not how that framework was designed, right?

[20:11]

This is about your practice, big picture, you know, over the course of the year, not what happens during 15 minutes or during an hour lesson that I happen to observe, but this is about overall practice. And I think that individual observation, as you said, is so powerful for And getting into the teacher's thoughts about what's going to work for this particular class on this particular day, that's where the reflection can be powerful. But I think we've really got to be careful to save that kind of big picture scoring until we have the big picture.

[20:41] SPEAKER_02:

I am so happy you said that. I think one of my favorite analogies I use is that when people... When I started my dissertation and basically it was a lot of that work is in the book. It really came from, um, one graphic.

[20:53]

There's a graphic that, uh, Kim Marshall made from the Marshall memo and there's 900 dots on a, on a, on a board, right? And 900 boxes. And one of those boxes is colored in and that what the boxes represent is 180 teaching days, five, you know, each teacher teaches five periods a day. That's about 900 periods a year that they would teach. And one of those boxes was filled in black. The other 899 were days we probably didn't see them teach.

[21:20]

And that's what people get judged on. And I'm like, hey, that's not right. And to me, that's like, you know, if you get married, you're probably going to get a thousand pictures taken at your wedding. It's picking one photo out of your wedding saying this is what my whole day was like. It doesn't work that way, right? So I think the important thing as we do this is when you go to observations or they're doing their own video or they're doing their own work, when you sit down with the rubric, I found it great, like, I don't want to be the bad guy and say, you need help here.

[21:50]

Or I don't want to be the supreme being saying, hey, you're awesome at all of this and you're distinguished. It's here's what the rubric is. Together, let's slap the evidence in and see where we fit. So I use it as a partnership as I'm sitting down with the teacher or the administrator I'm working with and saying, according to the evidence I've gathered, here's where I have things fit in. What have I missed here? What can we add?

[22:10]

What have I misinterpreted anything? I've taken that approach. It's opened up. It's like more of a partnership and a supporting way to where it's been great conversations and people have been very honest about some things and realize that, look, this isn't me making a judgment. This is the rubric that we have. And this is us filling in the evidence.

[22:28]

So we can say, yep, this is where I am. And this is what I'm going to do to get better for the next steps. Because the important piece is to clarify where you currently stand to where you would like to be. And then the plan is how do we get you from here to the next step? And we want everybody participating in that if they're the top five teacher in the building or if they're in the middle or if they're not doing well. So I think the process is the same that way for everybody when we talk about it.

[22:54]

But I think that's a great point on your part.

[22:56] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, you're speaking my language. Absolutely. Well, let's circle back to one more distinction that you make in the book that I think is both very critical and very surprising to hear for the first time, and that is between evaluation and supervision. And I think we're pretty clear on what evaluation is, but I think often we see supervision as just a part of evaluation or kind of the mechanism for doing evaluation. What's the distinction there that you draw in the book between evaluation and supervision?

[23:25] SPEAKER_02:

So I think one of the things Tony and I did when we first sat down and wrote the book is said, let's be very purposeful on how we're going to talk about those three facets. And when we talk about evaluation, that's really ensuring that there's a competent teacher in every classroom. And it's about having a valid and reliable rating process. So it's basically just letting people know where they are. That is sometimes like evaluation is evaluation is not a bad thing. Evaluation lets you know where you stand.

[23:52]

The supervision part, we talked about the purpose of supervision is to support teacher growth by creating opportunities for developmental feedback that focuses teachers' efforts and empowers teachers to achieve goals related to improved professional practice. So I think the distinction really between them is one is more of a summative approach of this is where you're at, and the supervision in our minds is really about how do we create opportunities to support teacher growth And I think the other thing that's really important is when we talk about feedback, you mentioned in the beginning about how much time is involved for teachers and how much time is involved for administration. It's impossible for principals to be in the rooms all the time giving feedback to people for them to get better. And it's about how do we create a system where people can do different things to get different feedback about how they're getting better.

[24:42]

And sometimes the feedback can be videos of themselves and they can analyze how they're doing or they can see videos of other teachers to open up a staff meeting or they can go do peer visits or student surveys and get information back that way or sometimes it's just having peer discussions to open up again before a staff meeting you spend 10 or 15 minutes talking about instructional strategies you will not believe how amazing teachers think that is when actually This is kind of a sad commentary on education sometimes is that you get all the professionals in the room and let them talk about their craft for 10 minutes instead of all of the other get, get stuff that needs to get done. So. I think for us, the big difference between the eval and the supervision is really that formative, supportive process in the supervision versus the evaluation is more the summative, this is where you're currently ranking.

[25:30] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Paul, in closing, what advice do you have for administrators who want to take action, who want to, as you said, create a culture of expertise in their schools?

[25:42] SPEAKER_02:

If people are going to apply the concepts in the book, the only thing I would say is start small so you can make it a success. Use pilot programs. And I think The best thing to do if you're going to start doing some of these things is educate people about two things. Educate people about growth mindset and then try to take that approach with evaluation systems. And then also educate people about what expertise is and how we create expertise in people. Because if you can shift that evaluation is about where you are just being good enough to, we're going to create a culture of expertise and I'm going to support each and every one of you in the ways that you need to be supported so you can become an expert.

[26:16]

It's amazing the way people will start looking at things much differently when they talk about evaluation. And they'll actually welcome it instead of get anxious about it and try to avoid it.

[26:26] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Making Teachers Better, Not Bitter, Balancing Evaluation, Supervision, and Reflection for Professional Growth. Paul, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. Thank you very much.

[26:39] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high performance instructional leadership.

[26:43] SPEAKER_01:

So high performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Paul Mielke? I think one of the big messages to me looking at Paul and Tony's book is the idea that we need to be both practitioners and to some extent philosophers. I think we've got to have a clear philosophy of the big pieces of our work like teacher evaluation and reflection and supervision. And I appreciate the frameworks that they've laid out in their book that help us think in very clear terms about what we're really trying to accomplish. What is the purpose of teacher evaluation? What is the purpose of reflective conversation?

[27:20]

What is the purpose of supervision? Because when we cross those wires, when we mix up those purposes, sometimes we work against ourselves and we go into a classroom with a giant rubric trying to check things off when really that rubric is designed to sit at the table with us and be a resource as we talk about practice. So I want to encourage you to check out Tony and Paul's book. I think it's an excellent guide for anyone who is working to improve teacher evaluation for practitioners who are day-to-day involved in the work of of supervising and evaluating teachers and helping them reflect on their practice. And if you are in the practice of getting into classrooms on a regular basis beyond the formal evaluation process, you know how powerful it is to have more context for what you're seeing during those formal observations. As Paul said, when we go into a classroom for a formal, we're only seeing a tiny, tiny fraction, just one of those little squares in a huge grid of the teacher's overall practice for the year.

[28:21]

And if we can get into classrooms more often and have more context, have a better relationship with the teacher, know more about their students, know more about their curriculum and what's going on in their classroom, our reflective conversations, our formal observations will be far more effective and impactful. So I wanna challenge you to develop the habit of getting into classrooms every single day. And specifically, I wanna challenge you to get into three classrooms a day, which for most administrators will mean that you get around to every single teacher that you supervise roughly once every 10 days or once every two weeks, depends on your numbers a bit. But if you get into every classroom every two weeks, that means that over the course of a school year, in addition to your formal evaluations, you'll be in each teacher's classroom roughly 18 times. Now that might seem like a tall order. That might seem like a bit of a time management issue.

[29:09]

So I've created a free program for you called the 21 Day Instructional Leadership Challenge that will walk you through the whole process of making time to get into classrooms, what to do when you're there, when it's not a formal evaluation and you don't want to be weird about it, but you want to develop the habit of getting into classrooms and talking with teachers on a more frequent basis. Sign up at instructionalleadershipchallenge.com and we'll get you started.

[29:34] Announcer:

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