A Teacher Evaluation System That Rube Goldberg Would Love

Rube Goldberg Machine

Today our district explained our Teacher/Leader Evaluation (TLE) process. At least that was the objective of the "lesson" we were given. (We're all about objectives now that we are following the Marzano---ALL HAIL MARZANO--system.)  I am not certain that the lesson was completely clear for everyone.

But here is as much as I was able to take away from it.

Basically, there are three parts to the system (like Gaul in a way). 

First there is the Marzano (ALL HAIL MARZANO) part, which is 50% of our evaluation.  We will be evaluated on how well we are doing on the "Domains" that Marzano (ALL HAIL MAR--well, you get the joke) has established as the practices of effective teachers, things like posting learning goals, classroom management, assessing student progress, and so on. 

All Hail Marzano, the new God of Public Education!

Ok, fair enough. This provides an effective model for classroom instruction, though most of this is pouring new wine into old wine skins. In other words, it's stuff we have been doing in one form or another just given new names. 

Then it gets a little weird.  The next part of our evaluation comes from student performance. How well students do on their high performance tests.  This accounts for 35% of our evaluation, and it makes teaching a high poverty student body a very risky prospect indeed.

  But we are told to have no fear, that all is well.

Our student performance evaluation will be based on the Value Added Model (VAM).  What this bit of magic professes to do is PREDICT how much a teacher should be doing to bring his or her students up to speed and evaluates how well the teacher did. The model takes in factors like how much time the student is with a particular teacher, how that student has performed in the past, how well the student should be doing if he was with a teacher given how the student has performed in the past, family factors (I swear that during part of the presentation that fairy dust, unicorn horns, and the Elder Wand were involved), and so on.

The creator of the VAM

And now it gets really weird.  There is still 15% of our evaluation left.  And that part is up to us, sort of.  We then have to come up with 

Actually, that is OAM or "Other Academic Measures." Here we select a couple of things we feel we should be evaluated on that are appropriate to our teaching area.  For example, if I were to teach Advanced Placement English, then I might choose as a part of my evaluation how my students did on the AP exams.  Or if I taught music, then how my students did in competitions.  So in all, 50% of my evaluation could be centered on student performance.

Of course, all of this is really a first impression, but the impression is that this system is rather complex and rather subjective.  I fear that due to this evaluation method, teachers will more and more choose NOT to teach in schools that are already low-performing because of the inherent risk factors involved in an evaluation process that rides on whether or not those students, despite their socioeconomic backgrounds, respond to the teacher's best efforts.  The schools with the highest need will be the ones that the best teachers will avoid at all cost.

I fear that this is a train wreck in the making.

The Practice of Teaching

Today was the last day of the Centennial Teacher Academy, a five-day professional development teach-in done by folks from the Marzano Research Laboratory and the Pearson Corporation.  Much of it, especially for those of us returning to the school, was stuff that has been covered over and over again. However, we have many, many new teachers to our building and students. Should be interesting to see how they do when they finally meet our students.

Tomorrow, all teachers in the district report back to our schools for 3 days of work in our rooms and an introduction to procedures, rules, and "how-to"s.

Tomorrow, we will have an introduction to our evaluation process which the district will use to rate our effectiveness. So far we are not being rated on our test scores, but I am sure that is coming.

This will be my 20th year as a public school teacher.  I believe that I have about 4 more years to go before I am eligible to retire with full benefits. I have never had a year where I felt I was a 100% effective teacher.

Perhaps that's a good thing because I know more than anyone else how much room I have for improvement. Teaching is, after all, a practice just like the law and medical profession.

I am still practicing to be a teacher.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Siddhartha is Hermann Hesse novel exploring Eastern religion and philosophy, particular the teaching found in Buddhism. The book was written in the 1920s, but not translated into English until 1951 upon which it had a big influence on the Beats and hippies of the 50s and 60s.

I read books like this to gain what knowledge and wisdom I can find in them. In this book I gained a better understanding of Buddhism, and I appreciated one of the central themes of the book, the holiness of everything. However, I find that I can only go so far with that because for me there are actions and choices that are good and evil. Slavery is evil, always has been evil (even though there are verses in the Bible that seem to contradict this.) Justice is good; it is impossible for a society to be too just.

However, I do believe that our understanding of what is good and evil is limited because, as St. Paul stated, we carry our knowledge and judgement in "earthen vessels." Therefore, it is imperative that we gain as many different perspectives as we can to help us transcend our limitations.

That is the primary reason I like reading such a wide variety of ideas and opinions so that I can fill my vessel of understanding to capacity.

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I Really Love My Job

I feel that after the last couple of posts I need to clarify something. I really do love my job.  Let me emphasize that: 

I Really Love My Job!!!!!

I do not want anyone to think that because I write about all the problems associated with teaching that I would like to do anything else than being a teacher.  I may complain about all the paperwork, the regulations, the pressures put on my profession, but in the end, I enjoy working with the kids, love the feeling I get when the light comes on in their eyes, when they tell me later on that I helped them succeed in college or their career. (It happens and teachers live for those moments.)

I also love teaching at Centennial, with all the challenges that come with it. I feel as though the work I am doing there is important, is healing some wounds in our community. None of our students asked to be born in the circumstances they find themselves in. They did not ask to be born in poverty, to be born in a state where they may be hated for their skin color, to be born in dysfunctional families.  I need to remember this in my moments of frustration and work to heal and not further harm.

I love working with my colleagues who day in and day out commit themselves to the same work I am in.  Those who are not a part of the teaching profession, particularly teaching in an urban school, cannot understand the challenges we face and often make facile statements of condemnation.

I also like our administration.   Principal Johnson was brave enough to step into a tough situation.  She keeps challenging us to step up our game.  Reginald "Reggie" Smith and Andrew Pearson our assistant principals do their best to keep up with the demands of working with a student body whose maturity and social growth have been stunted by their poverty and culture. 

H. Charmaine Johnson, Principal of Oklahoma Centennial Middle/High School

I intend to write a good deal about the school this year, but whenever I write about problems the school or I am having, be assured that I do so out of love for the school and my profession.

Go Bison!

Feeling Overwhelmed

Drinking from a fire hose

Today was the 3rd day of the Oklahoma Centennial Teachers' Academy.  I feeling as if I am expected to get a drink from a fire hose.

We have been going over many classroom instructional procedures: learning goals (both simple and complex), lesson segments (each with "Design Questions" and "Elements"), protocols, formative assessments, tracking, and so on, each of which we have to build into our lessons and upon which we will be evaluated this year.

And that's just with the folks from Marzano.  Next we people from the Pearson Publishing Corporation get a crack at us.

We've been working on getting our first unit of instruction put together. I thought I had mine pretty well done, but during the last minute of the session we were told that we would have to add a new element to our planning. I feel like each year, sometimes each week, someone moves the goalposts further away.

Teaching to the Test

For the last two days I have been in the Oklahoma Centennial Teachers' Academy over at Langston Univ. in OKC. This will be my 20th year teaching in public schools in Oklahoma City. I began at old John Marshall High School in 1994. It is easy for me to remember the year because in the Spring semester of '95, the Oklahoma City bombing happened. 

There are many, many new faces in our faculty and staff. Somewhere around 35 teachers chose not to return to our school. I cannot speak as to what motivated them all, but several expressed a desire to get away from a school that has been given a "D" rating on the state's A-F grading system and is under constant scrutiny due to the fact that we were the recipients of a federal "School Improvement Grant" (SIG). This is the 3rd year of the grant, and we if don't show improvement, there may be serious consequences for our staff and administration. Right now, we are being schooled once again in the "Marzano" method of instruction. How well we do in following Marzano concepts as outlined in his many books including Classroom Instruction That Works and The Art and Science of Teaching will be part of our teacher evaluation.

So far we have been working together to get a unit planned for the first weeks of school.  In our Language Arts Department, we will begin with the short story and teach the students in how to read critically and identify story theme and elements.  I will be responsible for teaching the 11th grade and probably for helping students prepare for the ACT and other college entrance exams.  I will not be teaching as I have done in the past to introduce students to the scope of American literature, although American literature will form the bunk of the selections I will teach in fiction. Instead, I will be trying to prepare my students to do well on standardized tests.

At long last, the political forces have succeeded in getting me to teach to the test.

Designed by Laura E. Kelly (Click to view at original large size.)

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The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart by Leanna Renee Hieber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Really enjoyed this book. Even better than Darker Still.

The Twisted Tragedy of Miss Natalie Stewart find Natalie and Jonathan Whitby, Lord Denbury on the run. Natalie rescued Denbury from a spell that had his soul trapped in a painting while his body, inhabited by a demon, roamed the streets of late 19th Century New York City murdering young girls. There we have two gothic and steampunk progenitors: Oscar Wilde's A Portrait of Dorian Gray and Robert Lewis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

In this book, we get an added dose of Frankenstein as it turns out that Jonathan, as well as his mother and father, was the victim of secret group called "The Society" who seem to have several agenda including resurrecting the dead.

The main interest in the novel for me is how Natalie is developing as a character. A former voluntary mute, Natalie comes to more and more realize her strength and resourcefulness as she along with the clairvoyant Mrs. Northe and her friend deaf and dumb friend Rachel, who is in touch with the ghosts of the victims of the Society, uncover the group's plot and once again face down the demon who possessed Jonathan's body.

The plot is fast paced. The characters are multidimensional, the good not being wholly good and the bad, except for the demon, not wholly bad. Natalie and Jonathan have their moments of jealousy and even petty fights. The men involved in the Society's ressurection work are motivated by their grief for past loved ones. There are others with worse agendas, but they are only visited and, I assume, will play a role in future books in the series.

Recommended for horror, fantasy, steampunk, and gothic romance lovers.

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Flight by Sherman Alexie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am reading liking Sherman Alexie books. In Flight, a young Indian boy who goes by the name "Zits" because of his bad skin finds himself bouncing from foster homes to halfway houses to jails in an downward spiral of destructive, self-loathing behavior.

Zits lands in one more jail where he meets young white boy who calls himself "Justice". Justice breaks Zits out of a halfway house Zits has been taken to after his release from jail. There Justice teaches Zits to kill and convinces him to go to a bank and begin to shoot everyone there.

Zits does this killing several people until he is killed by a security guard. But that is only the beginning because Zits finds himself on a journey through time, space, and alternate lives. Zits has to live many different lives: an FBI agent, an Indian child at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, an adulterous husband and his own father. Each time Zits learns something about himself and about the human condition.

In some ways this book reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and the book's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. Alexie's use of magical realism makes the story more than a study of the plight of Native Americans. This story is about the plight of being human.

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Jeff Shaara creates a very good Civil War novel

Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jeff Shaara uses the formula used so successfully in Killer Angels, an historical novel about the Civil War battle of Gettysburg, in Gods and Generals which covers the battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. Each chapter focuses on one of the major figures in these conflicts including Lee, Jackson, Winfield Scott Hancock, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and others.

I appreciated Shaara's in-depth research which matches that of his father's book. The characters are complex and nuanced. The reading never bogs down. The descriptions and actions are as good as any created by Gore Vidal and Stephen Crane on the same topics.

One more thing. The book is better than the movie.

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I Like Big Books and I Cannot Lie Post Card from Zazzle.com (clipped to polyvore.com)

Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season by Jonathan Eig
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Eig's biography of Jack Roosevelt Robinson's first year as a Brooklyn Dodger is a scrupulously balanced account of an oft-told legend. Eig reseaches many of the stories told about Robinson's rookie season such as Pee Wee Reese's gesture of support for Robinson by giving Jackie a shoulder hug during a game when the opposing team cursed and jeered baseball's first modern black player. Eig is somewhat skeptical that it happened, if at all, as the stories about the hug claim.

Robinson is portrayed as a complex hero who felt very deeply hurt by prejudicial treatment, but chose to follow Brooklyn General Manager Branch Rickey's direction not to fight back when attacked. Instead Jackie chose to challenge his angry through his play. Eig demonstrates that it was Jackie's presence, particularly his speed and daring on the basepaths that enabled an otherwise average Dodger team to win the National League pennant in 1947.

I would recommend this book to baseball fans, social scientists, and history lovers for its honest portrayal of a game and a nation in the process of change.

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Great for my African-American Students

How Stella Got Her Groove Back by Terry McMillan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got this book for my high school students through a Title I grant. The books we ordered with the funds are to be used for high-interest young adult reading. I ordered this book because our student body is majority African-American, and I knew that Terry McMillan wrote her books about black characters.

When the order arrived, How Stella Got Her Groove back came with a note asking me that I preview the book because of its sexual content. So I did, and I am still making this available for the students despite of the fact that the "f" word is used liberally and there are a couple of sex scenes that, while certainly erotic, are not, in my opinion, graphically pornographic.

Stella is a 42 year old professional woman who decides that she needs a change in her life. She works in finance, a job she does not enjoy but which pays her quite well. She is also divorced with a 10 year old son. Stella sees an advertisement for Jamaica and decides to book a vacation in Montego Bay. There she meets 20 year old Winston Shakespeare who soon wins her heart. The conflict revolves around her age, his youth, her previous poor experiences with love, and her conflict over whether she feels true love or just chemistry.

I liked the book well enough. I like it better for my students, who often complain that books with black characters stress with negative sides of African-American life. McMillan has created a successful, professional character who struggles with human size problems rather than political systems. I think they, particularly my female students will enjoy this book.

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Brilliant Devices by Shelley Adina


Alternative history? Check
Steam driven machines? Check
Clockwork devices? Check
Use of human level engineering? CheckTrevelyan
Young characters having to get old characters out of trouble? Check
A tale of high adventure, dark conspiracies, and hairbreath escapes? Check

"Brilliant Devices", the 4th episode in Shelley Adina's "Magnificent Devices" stories about the adventures of Lady Claire Trevelyan has all of the elements of a great steampunk tale, and more.

This time Claire travels from the American (or the Colonies) Southwest to the wilds of Canada. Claire, having escapes the dastardly clutches of Lord James Selwyn, goes north to meet up with Earl Dunsmuir and family with Alice Chalmers, Adrew Malvern, and her wards Maggie and Lizzy, known together as the Mopsies. Alice has her own purpose in going to Edmonton where the Dunsmuir family have a large diamond mining operation. She is looking for her father, whom she suspects is involved in the enterprise, though under mysterious circumstances.

While there, they all uncover a plot against Count Zepplin, a brilliant creator of dirigible airships. And we discover more about the growing attraction between Claire and Andrew. Claire learns a good deal about herself in the process.

Lovers of the Steampunk genre will find all elements of what we have come to enjoy about these stories, plus Adina has created some memorable characters about whom I hope she continues to write.

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The "Looking Glass Wars" Open Up a New Front

Seeing Redd by Frank Beddor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the 2nd book in Frank Beddor's "Looking Glass Wars" triology. Queen Alyss must once again fight her Aunt Redd for her queendom pitting her White Imagination against Redd's augmented Black Imagination, as well as a new nemesis, King Arch of the Boarderland tribes. In a sub-plot Hatter Madigan discovers a lost love and unknown daughter, and Alyss and Dodge's love for one another grows.

This is a transition book to the 3rd part of the triology, Arch Nemesis.

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The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus by Robin Meyers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an outstanding examination of the current state of the church and a vision for a new church that is more like the person the church was supposed to emulate.

I have the great privilege to be a member of Mayflower Church where Robin Meyers minsters. This book spells out his vision of what the church should be and what Mayflower is trying to become. We want to be a place where all feel included regardless of their beliefs and/or lifestyles. We have no doctrine, simply a covenant to help each of us to realize all that God wants us to become. I recommend this ebook to all those who feel that the church needs to do more than simply do more than to affirm the status quo.

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My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Supreme Court justices are often closed individuals to the public. They don't hold news conferences, get out and press the flesh, or campaign in their home districts. So I found it refreshing to read this highly readable autobiography of Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which traces her life from her birth to a working class Puerto Rican family in New York City up to the time she takes the oath of office for the Supreme Court.

Her account of her life is very descriptive and attempts to reveal her loves and ambitions. I did not find out much of her political or judicial philosophy, but I learned a great deal about how she has been influenced through her (extended) family, her education, her work ethic, and her various positions in the legal profession.

I plan to turn this book over to our school library and encourage the students at our school to read it. I hope it will inspire them to do the hard work needed to achieve their dreams.

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Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess by David Lawson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book will be of interest only to chess enthusiasts and probably not to most of them. Use of long block quotations and a rather turgid style of prose made getting through this book a bit of a slog. Still, it was interesting to read about the first American champion, born long before Bobby Fischer who, like Fischer, lead a rather troubled life.

I would have like to have seen more description of the sites where the events happen, especially ofLa Régence, the chess cafe in Paris that exists to this day.

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Boris Spassky's Psycho Rook Sacrifice

Oh Myyy, this was fun to read

Oh Myyy! by George Takei
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Highly enjoyable book about how George Takei, Star Trek's Mr. Sulu, became a social media phenomenon. His breezy, readable discussion covers the causes he's become involved in, how he got over 3 million followers on his Facebook page, the problem with FB trolls, and his life after Star Trek.

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