Every year, educators go through the process of being evaluated. Administrators come to the classroom, stand in the back (or front) with a clip board, and watch. As an educator, I provide a copy of my lesson plan, and the butteries fly in my stomach throughout the ENTIRE period. Are they going to behave? Will I be able to actually teach? Do I have my objectives posted? Am I assessing the understanding of my students? Are they all paying attention and on task? Something I do everyday, all day long, suddenly becomes a nerve racking experience.
However, for some reason, usually the worst behaved classes do remarkably well during teacher evaluations. Maybe its because I'm actually a decent teacher. I am feeling mostly though the reason is the presence of an administrator in the classroom. Do they behave out of respect for me, because they want me to do a good job during my evaluation, or do they behave out of fear of consequences from the administrator? In my 5th year of teaching, I think I'm doing better at establishing relationships with my students.
This year, my students did an excellent job. I woke up at 5:40 a.m. before the evaluation to make up my lesson plans - I'm teaching a new class, and a new unit, so I needed to organize my thoughts. The project I planned for my students is creating a t-shirt design. As I organized my thoughts, I came up with a research opportunity where students find information about a college of their choice, exploring admission process, history, enrollment of the college, and what programs they offer. A stroke of genius- they'll do a design, AND research and writing!
I got excited about this lesson, and as I presented it to the students, we were able to talk about vocabulary words and learn new things not intended (what does post secondary mean? What does enrollment mean?)
The feedback from this observation was great. My administrator gave me a few suggestions on what I could do better, but overall, the class did an awesome job. What have your experience been with observations? How have the students done? How can I encourage my students to always behave as well as they did on the day of the observation?
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This is my 20th year teaching and I still get those butterflies when an administrator comes in to observe. I think I do a pretty good job each day, but often I do not know exactly what the administrator wants to see. I also worry about how some of my students will act in front of them. We are such a large school that I have even had students say they do not know all of the administrators. We used to have one announced and one unannounced observation. Now we have two unannounced. I always liked the announced ones because I could make sure we were doing an interesting activity. I cannot do them every day, but when they observe unannounced they may or may not see some of the best lessons.
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