Teaching evaluation – You MUST be kidding!

Here’s a hat tip to the Prichard Committee for triggering me on this most incredible article from the Madison Courier coupled with a ‘You MUST be kidding’ for failing to see the obvious problems with what was reported.

The newspaper reports that Carroll County Public Schools are evaluating classroom instruction with – are you ready for this – A 10-minute evaluation in each classroom!

That’s right – 10 minutes! That’s all. And, it sounds like that includes the time to type entries into a laptop computer used by the classroom observers.



When you hear the claims made from this evaluation program, which is called eWalk, and consider this is all based on a 10-minute dash through each classroom, it really gets funny.

Reports the paper:

“Administrators found 34 percent of classes were using SMART Boards during instruction, 2 percent were using video conferencing and 3 percent were using document cameras. Only 3 percent of students were using blogs and 1 percent were using the SMART Board to make a presentation during the classes evaluated.”

First of all, I am not sure there are ideal usage rates for any of these high tech teaching aids, or whether they produce much bang for the bucks (which can add up to considerable cash if you put these teaching tools in every classroom).

Furthermore, I wouldn’t expect teachers to be constantly using any of these tools, especially blogs, video conferencing and document cameras, during routine instruction.

Finally, I don’t think a random, 10-minute observation is likely to give you anything close to statistically defensible information about usage of these teachers’ aids.

It gets worse.

The news article says investigators,

“…found 62 percent of classrooms surveyed were paced well and 71 percent of the classrooms had students engaged in the materials. To help gauge this information, administrators also talk to students from the classes to ask how the material is taught, the pace of information and if the work is challenging enough.”

You’re not going to interview many students in 10 minutes, or even half an hour, either, if you want accurate data. And, with investigators watching, you’d think teachers would be on guard to do their very best and students wouldn’t be goofing off, either. Yet, this miracle of 10 minutes concludes that only 62 percent of the classrooms were well paced, and more than one in four students was apparently goofing off.

All of that from a 10-minute look.

The Carroll County Assistant Superintendent, Bill Hogan, admits,

"We're not going to see everything in 10 minutes.”

Well, I doubt the district is going to see much of anything about what really happens in its classrooms with a 10-minute snapshot.

This kind of stuff tells me that the teachers are not totally wrong to want union protection. If I were a teacher, I’d want a whole lot more than a trivial 10 minutes of attention paid to what I was doing before anyone leaped to conclusions about my true performance.