It's time for a better evaluation system

Considerable time and effort are spent evaluating teachers without much to show for it.  Rarely does a teacher excel in teaching and credit their evaluation system for helping them to get where they are.  Evaluation systems rely on overworked administrators that nearly always end up accomplishing compliance rather than effective feedback, evaluation and improvement.  This causes the administrator to rely on a rubric that often is inappropriate. For example, our district uses the same rubric to evaluate my chemistry class as well as physical education, elementary, special education, etc.  The systems on these rubrics are most inappropriate because they evaluate the teacher and classroom environment relative to an expectation. The end goal is the initial evaluation.

I teach science using the modeling pedagogy.  The big philosophical difference between modeling and traditional teaching is that in traditional teaching the student is explained what the final objective or standard is and then this is repeated with variety as the student approaches that standard.  Modeling, in contrast, starts with where the student is. What is the current understanding of this concept and how can this student construct models from their understanding that are revised when the models fail or require change to explain discrepancies.  A big flaw in traditional learning is that by focusing on the final product in lieu of the status quo for the student we build concepts with lots of holes and misconceptions. In a constructivist approach students are more likely to identify and deconstruct these misconceptions.  

How can we shift teaching evaluations from a traditional model to a constructivist approach?  We need much more contact time with teachers. Administrators do not have the capability to accomplish this.  I have had some of the most talented administrators that I could have ever expected and yet I rarely see anything of value from my evaluations.  Instead we should create positions dedicated to evaluation and observation only. If a position was only spent meeting with teachers on prep periods, setting goals with teachers, observing teachers, giving feedback to teachers and connecting teachers the evaluation system improves dramatically.  This changes the evaluations from punitive to feedback and change focus from busy work and compliance to improvement and growth.

Teaching is very isolating.  Teachers are alone in their classrooms for the majority of their career.  Even when teachers meet with other teachers and do professional development it is very easy to continue doing the same things.  But having a quality teacher working with you is a tremendous advantage. An employee that does observations full time will get to experience the strengths of a school and will be able to connect teachers based on strengths, weaknesses and goals.  If a teacher wants to work on assessment, the evaluator will know who does assessment well and can facilitate connecting them. The larger amount of contact time also allows the evaluator to observe the teachers more frequently, more informally and also work on planning.  You would get better consistency by having fewer people doing evaluations and since they would spend more time with each teacher.

This would also open up some time for overworked administrators to spend less time fulfilling compliance requirements and instead have positive impacts on their staff and students.  Currently most administrators can spend their entire day answering emails, attending meetings and dealing with disciplinary infractions. By opening up their time they would be able to work on mentoring programs, developing professional development, being more visible in the school and whatever creative programs they desire to implement.  

I Don't Hate Grading Anymore

I hate grading.  Grading takes so long and marking wrong answers for hours on end after spending so much effort on teaching is an emotional drag.  Grading isn’t just obnoxious because it is redundant, length and often mindless. For high school teachers it can often be used as a tool to shame students, to make them feel bad about themselves and that blame is tough to share and unhealthy to deflect to students and their parents.  

I was listening to a podcast about how we do not remember our memories correctly.  We replace our memories with what we currently believe as often as possible because of how brain storage works.  If you currently are aligned heavily with a set of political ideologies, you are likely to shift your memories towards those same ideologies.  But I couldn’t help listening to this podcast to think about how grading affects teachers negatively. When teachers grade they see the correct answer 170 times.  They even see the wrong answers so frequently that they will often tell the next group in advance of what mistakes they will make. So when a student repeats a mistake it can produce an unhealthy response.  We think of students as lazy or that they don’t care. This happens especially when teachers are put under external pressure from administrators, parents and even the students themselves. And as we continue this year after year we eventually reach a point where it is beyond the teacher to remember what it was ever like to learn the material for the first time.  We shift our memories to think of our subject matter is being so clear and simple that we disconnect from reality.

About six years ago I was going through my files and I found a set of exams from when I was in college studying chemistry.  I looked them over and a multiple-choice question from my advanced thermochemistry class caught my eye. I read a question and saw that I had gotten it wrong.  It was about entropy, enthalpy and spontaneity and I got really upset at myself for getting it incorrect. In fact, I remember thinking how furious I would have been had one of my students, even a struggling student, if they had made the same mistake I had made in my third year of college.  I had taken high school chemistry, AP chemistry and was over 30 credits of chemistry in to my degree when I made that mistake.

I think that moment has prevented a lot of negativity towards my own students as I now can remember with a little bit of evidence that sometimes students know something but struggle with the mechanics of the question, sometimes new information makes us uncertain and sometimes it just takes time to understand a concept.  When students get questions wrong I no longer take it personally. I will never get angry at a student for being wrong or needing more time to understanding something. If a student or parent tries to push an unhealthy pressure on me I feel comfortable deflecting that pressure away and not engaging with them. And I believe I just found the perfect grading system to make this all work.  

I have now been using standards based grading assessments for the past three years in my chemistry classes.  This has been a minor change as it is really just chopping up the test into sections that focus on 6-10 concepts from a unit (examples are on my chem website).  I liked the organization and felt that it improved feedback to students and parents.  But in the past two weeks I have started to add one last feature and I think the slight increase in grading is about to be overwhelmed by the reduction in mental health stress in grading.  Students will now be able to reassess on standards.

The logistics I am currently planning on using involve having students complete a form for any standard that they wish to reassess that focuses on directing students back to what we learned in class.  They can then improve their understanding of the topic and reassess. Reassessments will happen once per week on a rotating after school and lunch schedule that so far has been very reasonable to execute.  The following year I will join with the teacher next door to me so that each of us is only responsible for every other week to supervise students reassessing.

Grading still is not fun, but the last two tests that I have graded I have felt so much more at ease with student mistakes.  It is no longer an omission that will compound as the year progresses, but instead feedback that the student can rectify and incentive for them to reflect on their understanding as well as what they accomplish during class time.  It is no longer an indictment of my teaching but instead feedback to me on what went well and what did not. It is no longer a cycle of two week periods where students rush through material, but instead this allows us to slow down when needed without losing content.  

The Staff Meeting I Dread - Student Course Selections

A few years ago I had a student take the advanced chemistry class I was teaching.  They did not do well on the first few exams we took and eventually I checked over how they had done in chemistry.  Lo and behold their grade was quite low.  Now when I recruit for IB chemistry or AP chemistry I make it a point to tell the students first that if they did not do well in chemistry that they should take AP chemistry or IB chemistry.  Why go to college and struggle through the material alone when you can work through it with a high school teacher that is likely to be far superior at teaching and where you will move much slower through the material with a lot more assistance?  When I lead with this I often hear a few students laugh as I start the comment before quickly realizing the validity of my perspective.   

So you would think that the first thing that I would have done would have been to talk to the student about their struggles and their ambitions and goals of taking the class.  But this year I had an overwhelming amount of struggle going on from my students and myself teaching new classes.  So instead I deflected and would just get frustrated every time I had to grade another round of tests that had a demoralizing amount of wrong answers.  Then at the end of the year I was talking to the student about college plans.

Me “What are you doing next year for school?”

Students “I’m not sure”

Me “Do you want some advice”

Student “Yeah, well the thing is, I just really love chemistry so much.  It’s my favorite subject, but I’m so bad at it.  I want to major in it, but I don’t know what to do.”

Had my frustrations with their lack of success influenced how I taught this student?  If I had had a better perspective would that student not have those doubts?  I could have taught them better than I did but now they got to carry all of the weight of my decisions.  I was really disappointed in myself because even though I tell students that struggling students should take these classes I had never considered that a student could struggle and love the course.  What had happened to my idealism?  I love chemistry and I don’t love it because of how well I can do problems in it.  I love taking the best results and conclusions from the smartest people throughout history.  I love connecting the macroscopic level with models in the microscopic level so that students can understand what is happening.  Teaching and learning chemistry is my passion and I had missed a chance to share that with someone seeking just that.  

Every year there will be a staff meeting for our department where we talk about scheduling.  I dread this meeting.  Teachers somehow are systemically driven to develop philosophies that only student X belongs in a class and students that do not accomplish Y prior to the class are failures unworthy of learning that content.  There is an angry tone in this conversation and in my view it is because the conversation is unhealthy.  This meeting makes me feel like I've been trapped in the Stanford Prison Experiment and am stuck being a guard. We go to great lengths to prevent students from taking a variety of classes from AP courses to honors courses to regular chemistry.  I wish this were an isolated thing, but I am quite confident that it is systemic because I see it frequently on social media, at conferences and from many teachers beyond my own district.  But I believe very strongly that this mentality of exclusion is damaging and worthy of resistance.  Students in our district are exposed to it every time they sign up for classes starting in 6th grade.  There is an unrelenting pressure put on them that they are not good enough to be where they are and the mental health toll is a disaster.  Think of a student that has been told every year that if they are not at a level of success that they should not be learning about chemistry, or biology or trigonometry.  Now envision what happens if that student struggles in a unit.  Even if they had been successful in everything they had done to that point, any struggle signals to the student that they do not belong in that class.  The conversations we have about course selection likely make children unhealthy in how they learn and I believe also promote segregation based on race and gender.  

We need to stop leading students to evaluate what they should do based on their grades and external mechanisms.  Many would argue that grades are essential to this discussion, but we are talking about 11 year olds.  We are talking about 14 year olds.  How a 14 year old does should have no bearing on whether they can learn chemistry as a 15 year old.  And often the evaluations we do don’t even make sense.  Math skills are not essential to high school chemistry.  High school chemistry uses multiplication and adding.  Students that struggle with manipulations in chemistry class struggle because they do not understand the chemistry involved in the manipulations.  Biology success should have no bearing on how a student does in chemistry.  There are millions of people that were more successful than I was in biology both in high school and in college but only a handful of times have I felt out of place in chemistry or physics.  These perspectives are common and counter productive.  Teachers of struggling students resort to them because of being overwhelmed by the difficulty of teaching.  If a student is struggling with something we should be able to give them specific feedback, have the student improve and continue that cycle throughout the year.  Instead we give students overly simplistic directives to avoid having the conversations we aren’t prepared for.  Work harder, study more, read the text more, etc.  

Students, teachers, parents, counselors and administrators all contribute to the reduction of course selection.  And perhaps all of us suffer the consequences of this as well.  Counselors and administration often use course selection as a means to avoid dealing with problems in classes.  If a class is taught using extreme methods that are exclusive, we help that teacher exclude students rather than address the teaching methods.  This can cause parents to seek exclusivity as a sign of elite status rather than focusing on student achievement.  This can allow negative teacher perceptions to fester.  So let’s break this habit.  If you’re a student don’t allow yourself and your fellow students to be marginalized by course selection presentations.  Ask your teachers thoughtful questions and seek out their passion.  Do the same with counselors.  We all love what we do and chose our profession out of passion.  Help us find our spark again.  Guide us into talking about the best parts of classes rather than the worst so you can walk into a class confident you will learn valuable things rather than being nervous about grading policies.  At some point in your life, no one will care what grades you got at all.  For many of us, that is when we are 17 years old.  So let’s spend less effort maximizing our GPA for little to no benefit and more effort learning about the best accomplishments of humanity.