Innovation from Within: The Next Generation of Teaching

By Paul Herdman

Four weeks ago, a Nebraska Teacher of the Year and a colleague with whom I have worked, Maddie Fennell, wrote a piece in Education Week on teacher tenure that resonated with me on a number of fronts. The piece is about the need for educators to play a bigger role in the design of evaluating their profession. Maddie is currently a literacy coach for the Omaha Public Schools with 25 years of experience, and I would encourage you to take a look at her article.

While reading her piece, I was encouraged by the fact that Delaware has done some good work in engaging hundreds of teachers in the process – from the Dream Team to the hundreds of teachers who were engaged in the development of DPAS II – but I also know that something is not working. The News Journal opinion about the teacher evaluation results from two weeks ago being a “farce” hit home.  We know that 98% of the people working in any profession aren’t knocking it out of the park, so something must be amiss, but I genuinely don’t know what it is.

I also don’t think we can go back to doing what we did before, which involved even more subjectivity in evaluations or going years without any evaluation at all.  At the end of the day, this work needs to keep evolving.  Bottom line, it needs to be aligned to what teachers believe will help them do their job better.  If we don’t get over that hump, this does not fly.  It also has to be a fair measure of performance, and it has to be doable.

The good news is that we are seeing that this is possible. Under current Delaware law, districts, public charters, and teachers now have the ability to work together to come up with new approaches around designing smart performance management solutions. Through a partnership with the Longwood and Rodel Foundations, four public charter schools are working together right now, implementing an alternative evaluation system called the Teaching Excellence Framework. The schools have dedicated teachers and school leaders implementing the system and providing feedback and lessons learned that could hopefully be shared with the system as a whole. We started with these public charters because they came to us and asked for help, but if there are districts and local union leaders that want to brainstorm on this issue, we’d welcome the chance to talk.

The Teaching Excellence Framework is centered around defining, developing, and celebrating excellence in the teaching profession. The project is just in its early days, but here are a few key highlights:

• Administrators and teacher leaders are observing teachers between 8-10 times (or more) via short visits throughout the year.  (This makes sense to me in that rather than a couple of longer visits 7-8 months apart, there are lots of short visits with opportunities to experiment in the interim. This approach seems more likely to really help people change and adapt their practice.)
• Student, peer, and parent surveys were utilized to measure a teacher’s professional responsibilities, allowing for more stakeholders to provide information into the process.
• 95% of teachers reported feeling good to very positive about the shift to the Teaching Excellence Framework this year.
• 88% of teachers feel the observation feedback has been extremely or very valuable for their professional growth.

With work on the horizon to address teacher compensation in our state,it makes sense that we continue to take a hard look at the evaluation process, and ensure that we are truly celebrating our very best, and developing teachers that need more help.  My hope is that educators continue to drive what this looks like from the inside out.