Eval+&+Feedback

Home As administrators, coaches, or teacher leaders, we often come up against situations in which difficult topics must be addressed. What questions should we be asking ourselves before we speak, and what environments are best for when we do speak? Abrams gives tips and strategies based on research around conflict and interpersonal communications for action plans and scripting tools necessary to have those hard conversations.
 * **Mana'o** || **Resources** ||
 * **Having Hard Conversations with Jennifer Abrams**

Another packed session - I found myself nodding when she started listing all the reasons why we don't always have those hard conversations. || || Kaulu and I went to this presentation, and actually, in this part of the year, he's at 500 observations. What the Prezi doesn't include is his passion (he sang an Aladdin song to us). He believes in choosing which fires to take care of, and he believes in being very visible in the classrooms.
 * **300 Observations + 1 Principal + 1 Year = Feedback**, William Campbell, Gainseville City Schools, GA

Although the teachers get immediate feedback, he doesn't do face to faces unless there's a problem or if the teachers have questions. The tool ecove is on the iPad as a free app with pre-populated "look fors"

He also shared programs such as ECOVE, which is free, and EWALK, which he says is fairly expensive Opportunities from visiting classrooms so frequently:
 * Frequent and ongoing feedback
 * Communicate with students - if they can't communicate what they are able to do, know, and understand, that's a problem
 * Check on what we expect - you get to "inspect what you expect"
 * Check on current pratices

He collected perception data; visited every classroom for 60 seconds and did a tick mark of which kids were isolated, disengaged, etc., and found that the percentage of African American kids in these classes aligned closely with the percentage of students who present discipline issues

Professional Growth Plans - connected w/ classroom obs

Peer observations should occur often as they're non-threatening and most importantly, non-evaluative || [|Prezi presentation] || The constant throughout the sessions I attended was the message that teacher quality is critical for student achievement and therefore school systems across the nation are taking a discerning look at their current teacher evaluation systems. Supervisors and evaluators need to frequent teacher's classrooms in order to be able to mediate the identified behaviors of quality teaching. Effective questioning and listening skills to have those collaborative post-observation conversations was a critical target point of this session || || by Linda Darling-Hammond (report) || ||
 * **Mediating Teaching Behaviors for Enhanced Performance with Sue Presler, Center for Cognitive Coaching, Omaha, NE**
 * **Creating a Comprehensive System for Evaluating and Supporting Effective Teaching**