Measuring Teacher Performance Learning Context: The Key to Teacher
Evaluation
There is great interest today in working to improve teaching and the ability of our students to learn and to develop. However, new approaches to teacher evaluations that focus more on results through testing than the activities and context of learning are giving a false impression regarding what is wrong with our educational system. Now Pay-by-Performance systems are cropping up throughout the country that are even more results-driven and are taking away from what our teachers really need to improve learning. It seems the more we focus on the results the less attention we give to the interactive activities and classroom contexts of learning that make all the difference for the students.
Studies have shown that students forget up to ninety percent of what they learn through memorization over the period of a year. And, the more teachers are driven to cram information into the heads of students and teach to the test to achieve performance scores the more students are forced to memorize. Even those students who succeed in retaining much of what they learn for the test soon forget it or they never quite grasp the real understanding of how to apply the information in real world situations. Learning, therefore, is more than memorization and we must focus more on helping teachers to interact with the students in ways that create learning environments and context for learning based upon experiences, case studies, critical thinking and discussion. These are the vehicles for teaching that drive learning, curiosity and creativity and are absolutely necessary for useful memory as well as practical applications over time. Pay-by-Performance and results driven measurements are only a one-dimensional view of what is actually happening in classroom education. And, it will suffer the same fate as Management by Objectives (MBO) did in business thirty years ago.
MBO was a primarily results-driven system of measurement that was used by business to determine the performance of employees and departments. The main reason that it failed was the emphasis on results instead of the many qualitative activities that were necessary to achieve the results. So, the tendency of management to use the one-dimensional quantitative measures for evaluations failed to make the appropriate adjustments and account for the many qualitative activities that were necessary as the real measures of success. Consequently, many short-cuts to achieving objectives followed and even though it appeared that progress was being made in the short term, over time the performance of the employees and the overall organization failed. This is the same problem that is being replicated through Pay-by-Performance for teachers. It is producing a simple bureaucratic tool that takes the easy way to accountability by using a false one-dimensional measure of teacher success while it undermines the real learning of the students. So, what is the answer in order to help teachers to improve and to develop better learning environments for the students? What kinds of measurements should we use?
The answer to these questions lies in focusing on the activities necessary for successful teaching and learning. These activities include more interactive teaching and learning, class and group discussion, critical thinking activities, case studies, and the increasing use of cultural context and experiences of students, teachers and role models. Of course how teachers apply these activities successfully in class will determine their level of success. However, without them teachers are only depositors of information who teach to the test. And, MBO has taught us how results-oriented measures fail to improve performance over time and give false impressions of improvement. Let’s learn by our mistakes of the past and take the more qualitative activities-based approach to successful measurement of the performance of teachers. Good teachers will appreciate this effort more as evaluators will be looking at what is necessary for the real learning and development of students over time and not just short term one-dimensional data based on a test.
If we want to find real results-oriented measures of the success of our educational system, we really need to look at the evidence of what is happening in the real world to our organizations in business, education and government? What has been the performance of the graduates of our institutions of learning? Did they help to improve society? Or did they contribute to the near collapse of the economy? Did they succeed in alleviating hunger and disease? Or did they develop controversial drugs with side effects that kill? However, even these results-oriented measures do not tell us the whole story of what is happening in the classrooms. Schools do need to know which teachers are doing the best work for the students. So, how do we measure the success of teachers in order to help our students learn and apply what they learn in the real world?
Activities-based measurement is very practical through the observation of teachers in the classroom. Observing the use of interactive and collaborative teaching and learning techniques by teachers in addition to the use of critical thinking, case studies and contextual examples from the experiences of role models as well as the students can provide ample documentation to successfully evaluate teachers. Also, well-implemented observation based on activities can serve to help teachers to improve their teaching skills and create a better learning environment for the students. Such an evaluation based upon the details of activities used by teachers can help to enrich the overall curriculum of the schools and provide the teachers with real helpful information on how they can become better teachers. It will also show that the leadership of the school is really interested in helping the teachers through professional development and not just finding reasons to fire them. Most importantly, the students will benefit from the abilities of the school leaders and the teachers to collaboratively work together to create a better learning experience.
Copyright 2010, Global Leadership Resources: For teaching or classroom use only.
Discussion Questions
- Why are results-driven systems of performance review such as Pay-by-Performance bad for teaching and learning? How does it promote teaching to the test and memorization?
- Discuss the problems with teaching to the test and memorization and how evaluations based on interactive activities and the context of learning can help teachers to improve curriculum.
- Why did Management by Objectives (MBO) fail? How is Pay-by-Performance similar to MBO? What are the consequences of a Pay-by-Performance System?
- What is Activities-Based Evaluation and how is it best implemented?
- What kinds of documentation of teaching and learning activities can be used by observers to help teachers improve?
- What kinds of teaching elements are included in the “Context of Learning” and how are they used by teachers to help students learn?
- How can Activities-Based Evaluation help school leaders and teachers to collaborate and learn to work better together to improve teaching and learning?
