Stop Evaluating Teachers Based on Things They Don't Control
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that teacher evaluations should focus on professional judgment and instructional quality, not on outcomes teachers can't control.
Key Takeaways
- Teachers don't control everything - Student demographics, home environment, and prior learning all affect outcomes
- Evaluate what they can control - Instructional decisions, classroom environment, and professional judgment are within teacher control
- Fair evaluation builds trust - When teachers feel evaluations are fair, they're more open to feedback and growth
Transcript
I don't think teachers should be evaluated based on things that are outside their control.
I think teachers should be evaluated based on their own actions and their professional judgment given the circumstances.
See, the circumstances that teachers are operating under vary so greatly.
Your students vary, your school varies, your administration varies, your colleagues vary so much from person to person, from job to job, that the same actions under different circumstances could yield very, very different results.
And if we think about what each individual educator is responsible for and actually has the ability to control, it's their own decisions.
It's their own actions.
It's their own consistency.
It's their own judgment.
And I think that makes a better basis for evaluation than, say, your student test scores.
Your student test scores are largely outside of your control.
The better you teach, the better they're going to be, but only to a limited extent.
extent.
And the same with anything that depends too much on student outcomes in it.
Like, of course, we naturally want to evaluate teachers based on outcomes.
We care about student learning outcomes.
But if we overestimate how much of those outcomes are in teachers control, then we're going to end up evaluating teachers based on things that they don't control.
And we're going to create incentives to not work with needier students.
That's my biggest objection to these bad systems of incentives that say, oh, it should all depend on student learning.
That's how you know if you're a good teacher.
Well, if you have students who are struggling in some way, like the most obvious example is if you have students who are chronically absent, it does not matter how good a teacher you are.
You can't make students learn from you when they're absent.
That is going to just be a gap in their learning.
And I don't think we should hold teachers accountable for things like student absenteeism.
We have to recognize that teachers' situations vary, and what matters is their judgment in that situation.
Given the circumstances, given what you're dealing with, given what's going on today, did you do the right thing?
And that applies at the lesson level as well, right?
Like if we have...
Different things going on in the school, maybe the lesson is disrupted, maybe a lot of kids are absent.
What you do that day should depend on all of those factors, not some sort of abstract rubric for what defines a good lesson or what strategies you are expected to use in any given lesson.
You have to do things that make sense for your students, for your class that day, and and not try to adhere to some standard that isn't aware of those.
So I think we've got to start evaluating teachers on professional judgment and the actions that they take in the situations that they are in.
Let me know what you think about that.