The problem with trying to identify "high performing" and "low performing" teachers is that so much of the rating process is subjective. We've all heard the comment that, if a teacher has a classroom of kids without family support, enough sleep, or a safe place to do homework they're considerably less likely to have a classroom that excels on standardized tests than a teacher in a school where those things are de rigeur...but the converse is also true. A teacher who refuses to individuate teaching for gifted kids, who doesn't follow the deaf kid's IEP, who relies on endless worksheets instead of making class interesting can still be considered "highly effective" simply because she has a preponderance of bright kids who test well in her class.
Likewise, one could rely on student (or parent) evaluations of the teacher, but that has its limits, too, given the politics of the average third grade classroom.
I won't get sucked into a discussion of the usefulness of unions, because that's a polarizing discussion with only very tangential bearing on gifted education. But I'd love to know what others think is a good method (at least in part observable, measurable, and not subject to circumstances) to define "highly effective".
Yup. Great teaching is like...
well, it's like
porn. (No-- really, stay with me on this one... LOL)
You know it when you see it.Unfortunately, however, there's not a good quantitative series of tests to tease apart those things from mediocre teaching... or art.
Tenure is intended to protect teachers IN classrooms from administrators who've never set foot in one. Administrators love to 'implement' new ideas. Even if what has been happening isn't broken, they like to do this. Teachers who won't go along with every crazy notion are labeled "uncooperative" by such administrators when they continue doing things the way that they KNOW in their hearts is right and good for students.
Trust me on this one-- I've been that teacher (yes, post-secondary, but my mom was that teacher in elementary). Administrators are frequently out of touch with reality to a fairly stunning degree. In their desperation to do "something" to "improve" things, they'll try pretty much anything; but seldom long enough for it to make a real difference either way.
Teaching is probably
best judged by alumni several years later, because that is what separates mediocre from excellent, not test scores or student satisfaction, or parent comments or even peer observations.
It's rather like parenting that way.
