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How do you know you're better at your job now than 17 years ago? Does an effective teacher evaluation system exist in your country that you can use as a referen

by arijo 15y ago

How do you know you're better at your job now than 17 years ago? Does an effective teacher evaluation system exist in your country that you can use as a reference to validate your claim?

Jach 15y ago
Plus one for "how do you know?". My only caution to add in the case of teachers is that since the problem (or benefit) with standards is that there are so many of them, and since one corollary is that when a standard is chosen it's hard to change later and experimentation is rare, then the situation is doubly worse for teachers whose jobs revolve around a standard of performance because unless they have tenure the risk of a failed experiment aimed at helping the students learn (as opposed to only getting a high score with some performance standard) is too high. Anyway, your comment immediately reminded me of this anecdote I had saved in my quotes file that I thought was apt: 'One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.” God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”' Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in Medical World News (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy; http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12/the-ethics-of-random-clinical-trials.html http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12...
yequalsx 15y ago
In the same way that a bad parent who becomes a better parent knows they are now a better parent. Some things are not quantifiable. I know of no effective national evaluation system for parenting and yet some parents are good parents. I know that I am a better teacher now than when I first started. I'm not claiming to be a good teacher. I'm just claiming to be a better one. It's common for a practitioner to get better over time so one should assume that I've gotten better and not worse. What is the point of disputing this claim or doubting its veracity? I don't know the purpose of your question?
- roel_v 15y ago
  "You should believe me because I say so"? Really? I'm not saying you are or are not, but this line of justification is an insult to anyone who considers themselves rational thinkers.
  - XLcommerce 15y ago
    Not really. I would have though that: 'do it a lot and you'll get better at it' is fairly self evident. Obviously testing of some sort would help us to determine how much better one became. I'd go so far as to say that it would be very difficult not to improve at something you were doing over a period of time.
    - wahnfrieden 15y ago
      I think the point they're trying to make (through this admittedly condescending questioning) is that when the institution is fundamentally wrong, elongated experience can only pervert rather than further skills. Or f it does further, it is only furthering a perversion of some concept of what's right. I think there's a degree of truth to that but but it's oversimplifying a bit.
  - romnempire 15y ago
    the bottom line is that america's eternal quest for a teacher metric is failing in relation to systems like the (perhaps overly touted) finnish one, where the discriminating factor for teacher quality is much more a measure of trust in the intuition of experienced teachers. I think the 'I NEED MORE NUMBERS' mentality of empiricism you're using here has neutralised the prospective utility of the intuition of experienced teachers who would make effective consultants, if they ever come across something that works that they simply can't explain. Obviously, questioning their suggestions and looking for answers is the next step, but to insult their ability to think and view their opinions with derison? How are you helping anything talking that way?
- quanticle 15y ago
  I know that I am a better teacher now than when I first started. Sure, you know that you're a better teacher than when you started. But can you prove it? What can you do that a fresh-out-of-college teacher can't? What can you do better? How can you show that you do your job better? As a programmer, I have a similar problem. But I don't just throw up my hands and say, "Well, some things just can't be quantified." Instead, I try to quantify them. I try to show how my estimation skills have gotten better. I try to show how my code now has fewer bugs and requires less maintenance effort. As a teacher, what can you show me to distinguish you from a wet-behind-the-ears graduate?
metafour 15y ago
Are you suggesting that if they're in the United States the system is not effective and thus can't be used as evidence?
XLcommerce 15y ago
Are you a better programmer now than you were 5 years ago? How do you know? Has anyone evaluated your work and told you are now 18% more efficient than 5 years ago? It may not be 100% accurate (since we are all masters at deluding ourselves), however it is possible to self-assess. Speaking as a teacher I know that my work is much better than it was 7 years ago (when I started). Simply delivering the material so many times has meant that I now have far more effective ways of describing and teaching certain concepts. I know that 7 years ago teaching a 10th grader how to iterate over an array would have taken 5 false starts and 4 weeks worth of instruction (bearing in mind that many lack motivation). Now the same content takes half the time because I can anticipate what kinds of questions will arise and how to deal with them effectively. Oh and teacher evaluation is hard. Teachers fear it because it's done by non-teachers to teachers. And as some comments on this thread indicate the world is full of monday morning quarterbacks who have lots of opinions without any real experience.
- boredandroid 15y ago
  In companies of any size, programmers generally go through quarterly, biannual, or annual performance reviews where they are assessed by the manager and peers. Programmers who are overperforming are promoted and given more responsibility (and money), those who are under-performing get coaching or are fired. This is the same as virtually every other job on the planet. You can argue this kind of evaluation is not fair (it is certainly less scientific then test scores), but the point is that on the whole it works. And teachers don't have it. They mostly cannot be fired, and receive compensation on a schedule based purely on years of tenure and education. A good analogy would be if programmers were given tenure after two years at a company and then could not be fired regardless of productivity or any other offense other than gross misconduct. If the programmers then (unsurprisingly) resisted every attempt, no matter how small, to reward high performance and punish incompetence, we would have an equivalent situation.
  - XLcommerce 15y ago
    I understand your points and they're all fair in the context of programming as a job. Code is code and can be evaluated in an atomic fashion, its objectively either good(correct, efficient etc) or not. How exactly do you accurately assess teaching? Test scores? I've worked at very tough schools. High unemployment, high crime area. Good teaching in this context meant the teacher showed up, made it through the year without having a mental breakdown and student attendance was > 50%. On the flipside I've worked at top tier private schools where success was gauged by how many of our students were in the top n% for the state. Teachers fear outside assessment from bureaucrats. Here in Australia we even have league tables for schools, and there has been talk of tying teacher pay to student performance. Obviously a worry if you are a classroom teacher who understands the human component of teaching (ie it's more than test results in a spreadsheet). In my opinion to truly assess a teacher you'd need to observe their teaching for weeks to see how they deal with the myriad of situations that arise in the classroom. What we end up with though is standardised testing which ends up telling us what we already know.
enjalot 15y ago
I read this question as an insult. How could they not know they are better at their job after 17 years of doing it? This is just my personal opinion but the true judge of a teacher's effectiveness is how much their students learned, and even that can only be used as a measure if the students were willing to learn in the first place. Relying on some national standard to judge teachers hasn't seemed to help any country in history to have better teachers. I'd wager to guess that periods in history where education unilaterally improved are more due to the motivation of those being educated than anything else.

by arijo 15y ago

How do you know you're better at your job now than 17 years ago? Does an effective teacher evaluation system exist in your country that you can use as a reference to validate your claim?

Jach 15y ago

Plus one for "how do you know?". My only caution to add in the case of teachers is that since the problem (or benefit) with standards is that there are so many of them, and since one corollary is that when a standard is chosen it's hard to change later and experimentation is rare, then the situation is doubly worse for teachers whose jobs revolve around a standard of performance because unless they have tenure the risk of a failed experiment aimed at helping the students learn (as opposed to only getting a high score with some performance standard) is too high. Anyway, your comment immediately reminded me of this anecdote I had saved in my quotes file that I thought was apt: 'One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.” God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”' Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in Medical World News (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy; http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12/the-ethics-of-random-clinical-trials.html http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12...

yequalsx 15y ago

In the same way that a bad parent who becomes a better parent knows they are now a better parent. Some things are not quantifiable. I know of no effective national evaluation system for parenting and yet some parents are good parents. I know that I am a better teacher now than when I first started. I'm not claiming to be a good teacher. I'm just claiming to be a better one. It's common for a practitioner to get better over time so one should assume that I've gotten better and not worse. What is the point of disputing this claim or doubting its veracity? I don't know the purpose of your question?

roel_v 15y ago
"You should believe me because I say so"? Really? I'm not saying you are or are not, but this line of justification is an insult to anyone who considers themselves rational thinkers.
- XLcommerce 15y ago
  Not really. I would have though that: 'do it a lot and you'll get better at it' is fairly self evident. Obviously testing of some sort would help us to determine how much better one became. I'd go so far as to say that it would be very difficult not to improve at something you were doing over a period of time.
  - wahnfrieden 15y ago
    I think the point they're trying to make (through this admittedly condescending questioning) is that when the institution is fundamentally wrong, elongated experience can only pervert rather than further skills. Or f it does further, it is only furthering a perversion of some concept of what's right. I think there's a degree of truth to that but but it's oversimplifying a bit.
- romnempire 15y ago
  the bottom line is that america's eternal quest for a teacher metric is failing in relation to systems like the (perhaps overly touted) finnish one, where the discriminating factor for teacher quality is much more a measure of trust in the intuition of experienced teachers. I think the 'I NEED MORE NUMBERS' mentality of empiricism you're using here has neutralised the prospective utility of the intuition of experienced teachers who would make effective consultants, if they ever come across something that works that they simply can't explain. Obviously, questioning their suggestions and looking for answers is the next step, but to insult their ability to think and view their opinions with derison? How are you helping anything talking that way?
quanticle 15y ago
I know that I am a better teacher now than when I first started. Sure, you know that you're a better teacher than when you started. But can you prove it? What can you do that a fresh-out-of-college teacher can't? What can you do better? How can you show that you do your job better? As a programmer, I have a similar problem. But I don't just throw up my hands and say, "Well, some things just can't be quantified." Instead, I try to quantify them. I try to show how my estimation skills have gotten better. I try to show how my code now has fewer bugs and requires less maintenance effort. As a teacher, what can you show me to distinguish you from a wet-behind-the-ears graduate?

metafour 15y ago

Are you suggesting that if they're in the United States the system is not effective and thus can't be used as evidence?

XLcommerce 15y ago

Are you a better programmer now than you were 5 years ago? How do you know? Has anyone evaluated your work and told you are now 18% more efficient than 5 years ago? It may not be 100% accurate (since we are all masters at deluding ourselves), however it is possible to self-assess. Speaking as a teacher I know that my work is much better than it was 7 years ago (when I started). Simply delivering the material so many times has meant that I now have far more effective ways of describing and teaching certain concepts. I know that 7 years ago teaching a 10th grader how to iterate over an array would have taken 5 false starts and 4 weeks worth of instruction (bearing in mind that many lack motivation). Now the same content takes half the time because I can anticipate what kinds of questions will arise and how to deal with them effectively. Oh and teacher evaluation is hard. Teachers fear it because it's done by non-teachers to teachers. And as some comments on this thread indicate the world is full of monday morning quarterbacks who have lots of opinions without any real experience.

boredandroid 15y ago
In companies of any size, programmers generally go through quarterly, biannual, or annual performance reviews where they are assessed by the manager and peers. Programmers who are overperforming are promoted and given more responsibility (and money), those who are under-performing get coaching or are fired. This is the same as virtually every other job on the planet. You can argue this kind of evaluation is not fair (it is certainly less scientific then test scores), but the point is that on the whole it works. And teachers don't have it. They mostly cannot be fired, and receive compensation on a schedule based purely on years of tenure and education. A good analogy would be if programmers were given tenure after two years at a company and then could not be fired regardless of productivity or any other offense other than gross misconduct. If the programmers then (unsurprisingly) resisted every attempt, no matter how small, to reward high performance and punish incompetence, we would have an equivalent situation.
- XLcommerce 15y ago
  I understand your points and they're all fair in the context of programming as a job. Code is code and can be evaluated in an atomic fashion, its objectively either good(correct, efficient etc) or not. How exactly do you accurately assess teaching? Test scores? I've worked at very tough schools. High unemployment, high crime area. Good teaching in this context meant the teacher showed up, made it through the year without having a mental breakdown and student attendance was > 50%. On the flipside I've worked at top tier private schools where success was gauged by how many of our students were in the top n% for the state. Teachers fear outside assessment from bureaucrats. Here in Australia we even have league tables for schools, and there has been talk of tying teacher pay to student performance. Obviously a worry if you are a classroom teacher who understands the human component of teaching (ie it's more than test results in a spreadsheet). In my opinion to truly assess a teacher you'd need to observe their teaching for weeks to see how they deal with the myriad of situations that arise in the classroom. What we end up with though is standardised testing which ends up telling us what we already know.

enjalot 15y ago

I read this question as an insult. How could they not know they are better at their job after 17 years of doing it? This is just my personal opinion but the true judge of a teacher's effectiveness is how much their students learned, and even that can only be used as a measure if the students were willing to learn in the first place. Relying on some national standard to judge teachers hasn't seemed to help any country in history to have better teachers. I'd wager to guess that periods in history where education unilaterally improved are more due to the motivation of those being educated than anything else.