The Seattle Times – Martin R. West
“Watching from a corner of the room, evaluator Elaine Jackson made a mental note: Amin had missed an opportunity for the kind of conversation that builds learning. Amin might have asked the children, for example, what the wind did to the trees or whether they had ever lost power at home. Jackson is part of a growing effort to solve a tough problem: how to accurately and fairly critique teaching in ways that helps teachers improve. The art of teaching has long been considered something of a black box — a matter of personal style, intuition and philosophy that couldn’t be defined, much less reliably measured. But now the lid is starting to come off. Trained observers like Jackson — armed with elaborate guides that describe what good teaching looks like and how to rate it — are changing the way teachers are evaluated, not only in preschool but in K-12 classrooms. These new, in-depth observations are replacing or supplementing the ways teachers have been judged in the past, most often with superficial visits by school principals. The goal is to make teacher evaluations more objective than a principal’s opinion and more useful for self-improvement than a ranking based on student test scores.”(more)