Classroom Observations: the tough part of teacher evals that no one is talking about

Welcome to my blog! I’ll be using this space to interact with parents, teachers and other readers with an interest in education in NM. It will include tidbits that don’t make the paper and, knowing me, will probably be pretty heavy on research and wonkery.

Today I spent a few hours listening in on a meeting of NM TEACH, the panel convened by Education Secretary-designate Hanna Skandera to hash out the details of teacher evaluation. I’ve written about this effort a lot. Get up to speed here.

Lots of people get worked up about the test score portion of this evaluation system. But today’s discussion was about teacher observation protocols. Under the PED’s rule, observations account for 25 percent of teacher evals. A lot was said, but my read is that the crux of the issue is this: how do we give principals the time and resources they need to do meaningful evals? There was lots of talk about the role of the principal, and how much paperwork and management has become part of the job. Is there a way to make the principal job more focused on instructional leadership?

Other ideas being discussed were certifying other administrators or even outside consultants or peer teachers to be evaluators.

Also lots of talk about inter-rater reliability, which is a fun stats term that means that if several evaluators observe the same lesson, they would evaluate it similarly. This is going to be important going forward if teachers are to have confidence in the process.