Teacher Evaluation Form By Principal: Fill & Download for Free

My students at the time thought it was a big mystery, but I and the other teachers all knew it was coming, we were just staying quiet about it out of respect.It was over Christmas break several years ago. The teacher in question was an older gentleman who should have retired before it got as bad as it did for him, but I think he needed a reason to wake up and feel useful every morning. He had no wife or kids and I think his job was all he had going for him.The previous summer, our old principal… the one who hired this teacher some 40 years earlier… retired and a new, younger, more energetic principal took their place. That new principal inherited the entire faculty for the next year… the contracts had already been signed.There was friction between the new principal and the older teacher immediately. At our summer meetings, the new principal introduced a new online teacher evaluation form that we had to complete every month. It was a little complicated and seemed pointless to all of us, but we were told to do it, so we did.Except the older teacher. He sat in the meetings and refused to touch the computer in front of him. He’d always had a strong anti-technology tendency in class.Over the next few months, the new principal made several other changes, most of which we all thought were positive changes, and all of which the old teacher refused to participate in. He just kept doing what he’d been doing for the previous 40 years.By November of that year, the decision had been made that he had to go. At his request, he was allowed to stay until Christmas break, so he could use the break to clean out his room and still have time for his replacement to move into the room. He also requested that no students be told he was leaving, and that this would be listed as a mid-year retirement for medical reasons, not that he was being fired.I ended up helping him move some of his stuff out of his room over Christmas break.When the students returned, they all asked about him. All the teachers would say was that “he retired.” The students thought it was odd that he’d do that in the middle of the school year.

Good teachers can not only provide factual knowledge, they can encourage and inspire. Bad teachers not only provide less knowledge, they can confuse and discourage. The goal of teacher evaluations is to identify poor teachers. Maybe they get help in some places but probably they get fired. The hope is that the bad teachers who are fired will be replaced by new, good teachers. Maybe sometimes evaluations identify good teachers and they get rewards. But mostly evaluations are a danger to teachers.Evaluations were traditionally done by principals observing their teachers in the classroom. That's considered too subjective. Most proposals for evaluations now call for including at least some student results on standardized tests. The problem with this is, student results depend not only on how good a job the teacher did but also the students the teacher was given. So a teacher who is really good at helping kids who have fallen behind can get fired because the class ends up less behind - but still behind. All this means that it's not only bad teachers who are threatened by evaluations.Somewhere, I hope there's a teachers union working with education researchers to find objective measures of teacher ability. But so far I've only heard of unions opposing existing evaluation methods and even the possibility of objective evaluation.New York State (among others) received Federal Race To The Top money, in part by promising to implement teacher evaluations. The state waited a while for proposals from teachers, then gave up and mandated a particular weighting for standardized tests. The rest had to be developed by the local school districts, with agreement from labor. The Rochester city school district has submitted their plan and is waiting for it to be approved. But I heard that about 700 school districts in the state have missed the deadline. Failing to submit an acceptable plan is supposed to cost the school district some of the state aid they receive.It's possible that somewhere, down the road, all this may improve education. But it also seems possible that the messiness and uncertainty will discourage many good people from becoming teachers.

Yep.If there’s a teacher with control issues in their classroom, the other teachers will let the principal know.“You need to talk to Mrs. Smith… Her class is always out of control…”There’s been a few times in my career when I got the nerve to tell my boss that one of my coworkers had control issues in their classroom, and it was causing disruptions for all of the other teachers… only to be told that I was the last teacher to speak up. Apparently, my desire to not meddle in other teacher’s business is unique. I only say something to the principal when I feel I have no other choice. Other teachers are much quicker to that point, I guess.There are a lot of reasons a teacher should be concerned about another teacher’s lack of classroom control: it’s potentially dangerous for the students, it causes disturbances to nearby classrooms, and the students are often more difficult to calm down for the teachers that have them afterwards.If it’s a teacher with academic issues in their classroom, it takes longer for the other teachers and administrators to find out, but they eventually do. Usually it’s because of a parent’s complaint or suspiciously-low standardized test scores.That’s one of the reasons for standardized tests… to judge a teacher’s effectiveness.