Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Reflective Teaching: Day 3

Day 3: Discuss one observation area that you would like to improve on for your teacher evaluation.

So, in my school district our evaluations are made up of two parts: our SLO (student learning outcome) and our actual evaluation based on the Danielson framework. I do fine on the evaluation and regularly get effectives and highly effectives in each of the domains. This year, had I gotten one point higher on my SLO, I would have gotten a highly effective overall, but, alas, I did not. SLOs are just not my thing. I am really good at tracking data, but it's hard figuring out the appropriate percentages for the SLO and to even figure out what the SLO should measure. 

In English, I find it really hard because I measure so much on growth. I might have a student start really, really low, but grow a lot of the course of the year, to somewhere in the middle. Our SLOs are supposed to be rigorous and push our students (and ourselves) to do better. Sometimes, though, for my students doing really well, doesn't look rigorous on paper. 

My summative year was last year (read: year that counts for my evaluations), so that gives me two years to really work on writing SLOs. I want my SLOs to be rigorous and to be meaningful (there are teachers who create ridiculous SLOs that have no rigor and don't hold students accountable for anything just so they can get highly effectives). I think that working on this area of my evaluation will be one of my major goals for this year. I also hope to be a department chair in the near future, so working on this area will be helpful when I am working with my future department.

No comments:

Post a Comment