Student Classroom Instruction Sign-In Sheet: Fill & Download for Free

When I teach a class, zero.If I have only 50 minutes with my students, I need all 50 of those minutes for classroom instruction. I’m not going to waste up to five valuable minutes of my class time by taking roll orally.I pass around a roll sheet, and students are responsible to sign their names to certify that they are present in class. I inform students in the course syllabus that signing someone else’s name on the roll sheet is an honor violation, so students have a strong disincentive to help friends who decided to ditch class. I’ve never had a problem with students forging their classmates’ names on the sign-in sheet.

Not with money. It’s about the systems involved, and public education has way too many of them. The reality is that once you implement a system, it is almost impossible to take back.We will not solve the problems in public education until we honestly address why we have them in the first place.This means that we have to analyze all the systems that run public education. Here are just some of those:the teachers’ unionslegislative bodiesdistrict administrationschool-based administrationfunds distribution (it’s more complicated than you think)management of teacher qualityMy answer will focus on the last item on this list: managing the quality of teacher that we allow to be in a classroom. The crux of this system, currently, relies heavily on the idea of rating growth in student scores above standards of achievement. (Standards are identified as those skills and concepts that are deemed necessary at a certain grade level.)How does a child’s academic growth relate to a teacher’s rating of quality? To the lay person, it make sense to link the two: children can only grow when they are instructed by quality teachers. To those familiar with the reality of life in a classroom, growth may or may not be a by-product of quality instruction. After all, demonstrating growth depends largely on what a person feels like doing at any particular moment.And then, there’s the question about what instrument to use for measuring growth.Standardized testing might seem the obvious choice, but that doesn’t work across the board. Not every teacher gives those tests. Think kindergarten, art, music, and PE, for instance. (The teachers’ unions also had something to say about it because standardized testing relies on the motivation of the students taking the test. )In came a system to deal with the situation. It is among the most convoluted and easily fraudulated* systems I have worked under. (*Yes, I like making up words.)Here’s the crux of it: combine teacher-collected growth data with aggregated standardized test scores, and throw in principal reviews on teacher performance.As you might imagine, the motivation to excel in any one of these three indicators is enormous, but the only one the teacher can potentially control is the first, so let’s start there.Teacher-collected Growth Data. Here’s how it works:The teacher sets 2 or 3 goals for her students, collectively. The goals should be academic, related to reading, writing, or math, and grade-level appropriate.The teacher gives a baseline assessment which serves as the starting point against which all academic growth for the year is measured.The teacher gives a final assessment and reports the percentage of growth in her students. The higher the percentage, the better her teacher rating.No one other than the teacher validates her growth percentage.One year, I set a reading goal for my 6th graders about recognizing the stated main idea in a short paragraph. I did it as a test to see if my principal would question the merit of a fairly low-level goal like that. He did not, so I went with it. It was pretty easy to show a huge amount of growth in my students: I gave them the baseline test on the first day of school. They were barely awake, and their scores were predictably awful. The only place they could go was up!One thing I hadn’t considered at the time was the level of material I was using to assess my students. I used reading selections from 6th grade workbooks. But I believe I could have used 3rd grade workbooks without any issue at all, because no one cared how I collected my data; just that I collected it. Never once in five years of working under this system did my principal ask to see the tests that backed up the scores I was putting on my spreadsheets. In fact, he never even asked to see the spreadsheets. This brings up the whole “slippery slope” concept of a flawed idea: if no one ever audits what you say you are doing, do you even have to do anything?Principals also set goals, but not for the students. They set goals for their teachers, in and out of the classroom. One year, my principal shared with his faculty that one of his goals was increasing the number of teachers who attend PTA meetings. Does this sound like a goal that directly benefits student learning? Sure, it’s good for parents and teachers to collaborate, but when we implement a system that rewards documentation and compliance, we introduce ideas that deviate from the actual goal of education: teaching students. By sharing his goal with us, our principal also shared, implicitly, that attending those meetings would be good for us, career-wise. Positive results for him, positive ratings for us. You can bet there was a sign-in sheet for every PTA meeting.I share these anecdotes to help you understand how systems, no matter how noble they may appear at the outset, can become heavily diluted and even corrupted as they are implemented.Now let’s look at the other two parts of the quality equation:Aggregated Test Scores — To aggregate means to combine all the scores in a set, in this case an entire school. This aggregate is applied equally to all teachers. The rationale for this, obviously, is that those in charge see the school as a unit, and that all teachers leading up to 6th grade, for instance, had a part in that 6th grader’s development. Spend some time trying to imagine the flaws in this theory, not the least of which are how tests are administered and what the attitudes of children are as they take the tests. (Individual teachers heavily influence those attitudes, by the way.)Principal’s Review on Performance - What the principal writes on his or her evaluation is considered sacrosanct, and just as there is no audit on the growth a teacher documents for her students, there is no audit on what a principal says about a teacher. Most final evaluations have somewhere around 25 to 30 criteria on them, things like “lesson planning” and “teaching to approved best practices”. Principals make their determinations based on 3 to 5 official visits to a classroom, plus whatever lobbying a teacher is able to do. Obviously, the more favor one has curried with one’s principal, the better the marks will be, as there is ample room for individual interpretation of what one sees in a classroom.Take this possible scenario: when the principal arrives in the classroom to observe, he sees desks arranged in table groups and students milling around the room, some sharpening pencils, others taking things out of their desks or reading a graphic novel, and still others laughing with one or more people. The teacher has her focus on the interactive white board at the front of the room. At the last minute, a late student rushes in.What will the principal note on his clipboard?Possibility 1:teacher control not demonstrated (students milling around and laughing)desks arranged to encourage off-task behaviorteacher had her back to the studentsstudent’s tardiness was not addressedPossibility 2:students given the responsibility to make themselves ready for classdesks arranged to promote student collaborationteacher was able to focus on important lesson prep involving state-of-the-art technologya tardy student was allowed to regain his composure after entering class without public censure or humiliationIn my last district, the principal’s evaluation counted for 50% of my overall rating, while my own growth data counted for 30%. These are considered objective measurements by the education elite. What would you consider them?Not only are most systems in education complex, they are also expensive, requiring a lot of non-teaching jobs to administer and a lot of paperwork to handle. If a process is worthwhile, the expense and manpower involved in it are also worthwhile. Not so with current teacher evaluation. As a system, it is a sham: it encourages fraud and corruption among all those involved. For more on this, visit my website.I’ll sum up with this: The reason it is so hard to solve the problems in public education is because most of them are systemically entrenched. Until we address the systems, we cannot solve the problems inherent in them.

Yes.Typically, if it’s something that could impact a student’s learning, other teachers or counselors who’ve worked with the student before will spread the word to the student’s new teachers every year.“FYI, Timmy’s mother just got remarried, and Timmy’s having a hard time adjusting to his step-father, and he seems to be lashing out at all men in his life, including male teachers…”Positive news about a student’s home life spreads quickly too:“Timmy’s parents are very well-off, involved with the school, and generous. They’ll introduce themselves in person within the first week and ask if you need anything in your classroom. They’re serious about that. They bought me a printer, and I was only kind of joking when I said I wanted one. I didn’t think they were taking notes. They’re good people…”Sometimes, we get special instructions about which parents aren’t allowed to pick up their own children from school. That’s usually a sign of a major problem at home.Doing two parent/teacher conferences for the mother and father, because they can’t be in the same room together, is also a good clue about some of the things that kid’s been through.The contact sheet on file for the student is another good clue. If it only lists one parent, and the emergency contact is a grandparent, it’s safe to assume the other parent is not involved in that kid’s life very much.