P3 - Teacher Evaluations

The article on Teacher Evaluation can be a difficult one to comprehend if you’re just skimming through it, but after a decent conversation with the one and only Mr. Currin, I feel that I understand what is going on.

Rather than being evaluated on their teaching ability in the classroom, teachers are being evaluated off of the test scores at the end of the year. Just because you are preparing a kid to get every question right on the exam on the end of the year, does not mean that they understand the material completely. You are basically programming a kid to get everything right without them truly comprehending the subject. I believe the true way to see if students are being taught properly is seeing how well they can teach it to their peers/classmates. If they have the ability to teach the subject after the teacher has showed them how things work, that goes to show that they do understand what is going on and they can figure out their own problems if they happen to come up.

It’s not fair that great teachers are getting low ratings because they aren’t burning the correct answers into their students’ heads. Even if they aren’t being laid off because of their ratings, it’s still tough for a teacher to keep doing what they love while having a horrible reputation. I believe that teachers should be rated based off of what they do in the classroom. The activities that they perform in class in order for students to learn the material. Teachers shouldn’t have to worry about their teaching abilities all year to see how well their students are going to do on the final test. It’s a pretty confusing concept to wrap your head around in the end, but long story short… teacher evaluations are not fair.