Holding Teachers to the Same Standards as Their Students
10/07/2017

The IT industry moves at
a rapid pace. And this usually brings about a lot of positive results. But it
can sometimes make it hard to properly integrate with slower moving fields. One
of the best examples of this contrast can be found within the modern elementary
or high school.
Most parents know that their kids are using computers at school. The exact
nature of these computers in a child’s education might vary by grade and
school. But it’s usually analogous to how parents remember their own youth. The
methods by which teachers present material has changed over time. And the
lesson’s medium sometimes changes from books to text files and film reel to
video file. But most parents will still see a modern reflection of old
classroom material in their own child’s life. This represents an evolution in
educational material rather than a revolutionary new approach.
That’s not to say that computers aren’t dramatically changing some parts of the
educational experience though. It’s simply that the areas where change happens
most frequently isn’t in a child’s computer. How a child learns and has that
learning tested is usually standardized and slow to change. Instead, the most
rapid evolution in academic testing is applied to the child’s teacher.
Schools have tested educator effectiveness in different ways over time. But
until recently there just haven’t been very objective ways to measure a
teacher’s performance. One particularly difficult area involves separating a
child’s performance from that of his teacher. It’s not easy to sort out how
much of a child’s grades are due to his own talents, that of the teacher or a
combination of both. Intuition and guesswork have had to substitute for solid
analysis and methodology. But the previously mentioned technological advances
provide a way to get around that problem.
A combination of solid methodology on the software side and easily portable
hardware can make teacher evaluation straightforward. There’s quite a bit of
variation within this type of educational software. But evaluation software
usually focusses on classroom walkthroughs.
School administrators typically sit in on one or more classes for every
teacher. This part of the process remains unchanged from the time that most of
the parents were in school. The big difference comes from a laptop or mobile
app that the administrator will carry with him through each session. Any type
of classroom walkthrough software guides the administrator through the
evaluation process.
It’s important to note that this usually involves real-time dynamic computation
on some level. A casual observer might not see much difference from decades old
checklists on a piece of paper. The administrator might still check items off a
list on his laptop or mobile device. But what makes the process effective is
what’s going on in the background. As data is recorded it’s also being weighed
and evaluated. The system can then offer up new suggestions or use predefined
algorithms to work with the newly generated data. The results of that work
might then be fed right back into the currently running evaluation.
The result is an evaluation that’s more objective. It focuses in on areas where
one would normally use guesswork. And it results in a solid evaluation of a
teacher that matches up quite well to how we test children on their lessons.
The exact nature of this evaluation will differ by exact software package. But
they all share a common goal of raising the bar for teacher evaluation.