It's Time to Rethink Teacher Supervision and Evaluation

The process by which most teachers are supervised and evaluated is inefficient, ineffective, and a poor use of principals' time, argues Mr. Marshall. It needs to be drastically streamlined and linked to a broader strategy for improving teaching and learning. A principal boasts that he spends two hours a day in classrooms. And it's true -- he really does visit his school's 17 teachers daily, chatting with students and occasionally chiming in on a lesson. But when teachers are asked what kind of feedback they get, they say the principal rarely talks to them about what he sees when he strolls through their classes. * * * A principal gets complaints from several parents about a history teacher's problems with discipline but is so overwhelmed that she rarely visits his classroom. When she does her required observation of his she sees a carefully planned lesson featuring an elaborate PowerPoint presentation and well-behaved students. The principal feels she has no choice but to do a positive write-up of this lesson and give the teacher a satisfactory rating. * * * A principal spends four entire weekends in April and May completing teacher evaluations just before the deadline. He puts the evaluations into teachers' mailboxes with a cover note attached that reads, Please let me know if you have any concerns and would like to talk. Otherwise, sign and return by tomorrow. All the teachers sign, nobody requests a meeting, and there is no further discussion. * * * A well-regarded veteran teacher hasn't been evaluated in five years and rarely sees the principal in her classroom. She takes this as a compliment -- her teaching must be okay. And yet she feels lonely and isolated with her students and wishes the principal would pay an occasional visit and tell her what he thinks. * * * A sixth-grade teacher has good classroom management and is well liked by students and parents, but his students do poorly on standardized tests. A new principal mentions the disappointing scores, and the teacher launches into a litany of complaints: he always gets the bad class, most of his students come from dysfunctional families, and he's tired of being asked to teach to the test. Later that day, the union representative officiously tells the principal that she can't mention test results in a teacher's evaluation. * * * A principal observes an elaborate hands-on math lesson in a veteran teacher's classroom and notices that the teacher is confusing the terms mean, median, and mode. The principal notes this error in his mostly positive evaluation, and, in the post-observation conference, the teacher suddenly begins to cry. Ten years later, at his retirement party, the principal asks the teacher what lesson she took away from this incident. Never to take a risk, she replies. * * * The theory of action behind supervision and evaluation is that they will improve teachers' effectiveness and therefore boost student achievement.1 This assumption seems logical. But the vignettes above raise a troubling question: what if the theory is wrong? This article takes a close look at this possibility and explores an alternative theory of action. Why Do Supervision and Evaluation Often Miss the Mark? I believe there are 10 reasons why the conventional supervision and evaluation process is not an effective strategy for improving teaching and learning. 1. Principals evaluate only a tiny amount of teaching. If a teacher has five classes a day, that's 900 periods each school year. A principal who formally evaluates a teacher for one full class period a year (a fairly typical scenario) sees this proportion of the teacher's lessons: In this case, the principal evaluated 0.1% of the teacher's instruction. The other 99.9% of the time, the teacher was working with students unobserved. …