Teacher Evaluation Questions 5th Graders: Fill & Download for Free

Sadly, I have. My son has Asperger's Syndrome and was put into Special Ed for third grade. His first few days of school were good, but half way through September, he told me he didn't want to go to school. Thinking that he just didn't want to be away from me (he surely is a momma's boy), I told him he had to go to school to get smarter than he already is. Over the next weeks that followed, he would come home looking worse for wear. He would tell me that he was bad in school and needed to be punished. I asked him why he would say that. He would never answer. One time, he came home from school without his Minions watch he'd had since Kindergarten. He told me his teacher took it from him. I wrote her a note requesting her to send it home the next school day. She replied stating “(He) bit into his watch, breaking it, so I have thrown it away.” This caught my attention. A red flag stated going up. If he had bitten into his watch and broke it, there would be little bits and pieces of debris that could have caused damage to his mouth. I immediately brought him to a dentist to have his mouth examined and his PCP to check him over as well. They even did X-rays of his stomach to see if he possibly swallowed something. Thankfully, there was nothing. The day before Halloween, I'm called into the school because my son is “acting up”. I am told by that he is behaving dangerously and I need to bring him to the hospital for a mental health evaluation. I do so and he is discharged 11 hours later at 1:30 in the morning. Later on that same day, my kid asks me if he can get dressed up in his Halloween costume to show his friends at school. I call the school and they say he is more than welcome to come in for an hour or so to show off his costume. I am welcome to accompany him. He is dressed in his Kylo Ren costume and is so proud of himself. Unfortunately, we have to go to his class with his teacher. I notice that he is looking at her with distrust in his eye. He sits at his desk and watches a movie that is being played. She sat next to him for half an hour. She moved to talk to another kid, and I took a picture of my son with how he was sitting with her near him. Stone still, hands shielding his eyes on both sides. Not typical behavior for a 9 year old child. (Sorry the picture is sideways i don't know how to correct it)He asked me to leave shortly after taking this picture. The next day, he was excited to go back to school and tell his friends how much candy he'd gotten. I no sooner arrived at work when the school called me and told me my kid was acting up again in a dangerous way, he was wrapping the strings of his hoodie around his throat, trying to strangle himself, screaming that he deserved to die because he's such a bad boy. I tell the people I work for, call my boss and tell them my situation and drive the 16 miles in record time to the school. I arrived at the school at 10:00 and demanded to see my child. I was told to take a seat, someone would escort me to him soon. I waited and waited. It was 1:30 by the time someone came to bring me to my kid. By the time I saw him, in an emptied out room with a box in it, cowered in a corner in the fetal position. He saw me and tried running to me. The teachers blocked him from getting to me. I asked them if they got him on video (seeing how all seven — yes, SEVEN OF THEM had cell phones with cameras on them) and they told me they didn't. That really got me thinking. How can one teacher take a video of a child destroying a classroom all on her own whereas 7 grown adults could not even fathom the thought of taking their phone out to prove to me how badly my child was acting? I asked them that and they replied that their main concern was keeping him safe and under control. After that was said, he tried running to me again and five of them blocked him from getting to me. There were two grief counselors there who told me my kid was mentally unstable because he wouldn't look them in the eye for more than a couple seconds and when he did look at them, he would stare at them with bulging eyes. When asked to sit still, he would fidget and look around the room … because of this, the two grief counselors deemed it best for him to “go to an institution that was set up like a boarding school for observation.” I'm sorry, but boarding school and institution do NOT belong together in comparison with each other. Not wanting to get DCF on my back, I readily agreed. We were sent to the hospital to await a bed at the institution we were told about. We were told it would take 6–7 hours to get a bed. We arrived at the hospital at 3:00 that afternoon by ambulance so I had no way of leaving with my kid. It was 1:00 the following afternoon when were moved out of the ER room we'd spent the night at. It was another 3 hours before anyone came to so much as EVALUATE my kid to see if he even needed to go to this institute. An advocate for the institution came to the room and looked around, confused. She asked for my child's name and when I gave it to her, she asked me the most curious question: Where is he? He said “I'm sitting on the bed, silly!” She flinched and said “Why in hell is this child being evaluated for a mental institution?” That is when my kid FINALLY spoke up and said “Because (my teacher) says bad things to me to make me feel like I am a bad boy.” I explained what happened the day before in school and the advocate said those teachers were severely abusing their power. I have since pulled my kid from the PSS and have been home schooling him ever since.My boy is a bright, active, and energetic 11 year old 5th grader who loves history and learning everything he can President Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and our cousin, Harriet Beecher Stowe. He loves reading Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and The Lord of the Rings books. He does algebra for math, and enjoyed looking at far off stars and planets in his telescope.As for all those teachers who were abusing their authority over my child, the teacher (who has multiple accounts of mental, verbal, and emotional abuse charges against her) is still teaching. Two of the other teachers have been let go of their positions and are now at new schools in a different district. The principal has been fired and recently found out he was the principal at the school in Western MA where Phoebe Prince attended — she is the girl who was being bullied. She approached her principal for help and he told her to get over it, there was nothing wrong being done to her, and she killed herself.

How do you measure teacher quality?Get comfortable. This one is going to take a while.First, I want to describe (briefly) why test scores don’t work. Many people think that they do, but those people are wrong. Here’s why:If we measure student proficiency, we have major problems:Students vary significantly in their degree of preparation. I have had students taking calculus in the same classroom as students who were unable to add single-digit numbers. Seriously.Classroom homogeneity varies significantly. Some schools are comprised of large numbers of high-achieving students. Others are composed of mostly low-achieving students. Still others are a big mix.Teaching techniques (and the effectiveness thereof) vary significantly. What works for some does not work for others, and vice versa.Teachers with students who are many grade-levels below the expected level of performance require instruction at a different level of certification than the teacher may possess. Translation: 9th graders might require instruction in 4th grade math - a discipline that the teacher is almost certainly untrained in.None of these things are the result of anything a teacher does, and yet they muddy the waters so badly that they make measuring a teacher in this way effectively useless.Even if we move away from measuring proficiency and move toward measuring growth, we have problems:Students who underachieve have done so by not growing as much as expected. In other words, it’s unrealistic to expect a teacher to turn a 10th grader who reads like a 4th grader into an 11th grader who reads like a 5th grader. If this were possible, it stands to reason that the 10th grader would most likely already read like a 10th grader.Students who underperform also tend to give up on school (particularly during high school), have low attendance, and suffer more from the deprivations of poverty (having to work a job to help support the family, rather than studying, etc.)Again, these confounding factors are outside of the purview of teachers, and yet measuring teachers by student growth is still very common. It does not work well, though it is better than going by straight proficiency.Another way is needed.Educational experts agree that measuring student proficiency does very little in the way of measuring teacher effectiveness and measuring student growth, while better, leaves much to be desired. What else can you measure? And how?First, let me assure you that promotion and graduation rates are worthless:Why are functionally illiterate students allowed to graduate from high school?They are far too easily manipulated to be of any value.Similarly, teacher attendance and education are pretty worthless, too - some of the worst teachers out there have degrees and never miss a day of school.So, if we throw out proficiency test scores, promotion and graduation rates, what’s left?Not much. For example, suppose we decide to measure something like average growth compared to similar students. You define a cohort of students as having certain characteristics, you measure all of the students like that in the nation, and you compare a teacher against that metric. Again, this may sound reasonable, but there are numerous problems here.These numbers are almost certainly going to fluctuate year-to-year for any given teacher, simply based on the random nature of student selection.Except that student selection isn’t so random, either. If you are teaching science at the same time as band, you’re almost always going to see lower scores than if you teach at a different time than band. Why? Band kids are nerdy (I love you, band nerds, and I was one, but it’s true.) They tend to do better in school than the average kid. So, if you’re teaching at the same time as band, you’re teaching kids who aren’t in the band. All sorts of this indirect tracking happens, and there’s literally nothing you can do to fix it.The courses you teach tend to vary from year to year. You might teach a class you’ve taught many times before, and you might teach a class (or perhaps several) for the first time.You get older, and presumably better at teaching, as you go along.Teachers go through phases in their careers. Often, they have young children, and so do less after-school volunteering, coaching, etc. This should not be held against them.Exactly half - 1 of the teachers in the region you’re testing will be below average on this metric. Surely not all of them are “bad” teachers. How do you decide what the minimum score is to determine if a teacher is “ineffective” rather than just “statistically unlucky”?Again, we are left with almost nothing of value here.Part of what plagues us is that we have a poorly defined question. What exactly is it that teachers are supposed to do? And, no, the answer isn’t “teach”. In the US, the answer is something more like “Get kids to pass tests and graduate on time.” But, we’ve already seen that the tests have little value, and that graduation rates are incredibly easy to manipulate.So, teachers have been tasked with doing something both impossible and useless. Great.Perhaps we should ask a different question: What should teachers be asked to do?There, I think, we can get to the root of how to evaluate teachers. When you think about the best teacher you ever had, the one that really most positively influenced your life, what comes to mind?Chances are, it’s something like, “Mr. Jones or Mrs. Murphy really connected with me. She made me feel important. He encouraged my learning. I learned a lot from that teacher. I loved that class.”That’s a teacher you want. But, even here, there’s a problem: lots of teachers have students say that, all while other students say things like “Mr. Jones is the worst. I hated that guy. He was always on my case. And Mrs. Murphy? She’s a jerk. She never let me do anything. This one time, she told me to just stop talking and then never answered my question.”However, there are a few warning flags that might be gleaned here. If almost all of the students say “Oh yeah, Mr. Smith doesn’t do anything!” or “He let us play video games for a week.” or “She talks on her phone during class all the time”, then you may have a problem.Similarly, if many students rave about a teacher, request to get into her class again, ask him what he’s teaching next year, request that a younger sibling get that teacher, you might be on to something.So, here’s what I would do to evaluate teachers:Create three ratings: Exemplary, Satisfactory, Reasons for concern.Acknowledge that the vast majority of your staff is “Satisfactory”, and that’s totally OK. Satisfactory teachers should strive to improve, but not feel like their jobs or livelihood are in danger if they continue to be satisfactory.Exemplary teachers are rare, and they are often ratedsatisfactory. They will occasionally merit exemplary ratings, but only very occasionally will they get these in consecutive years. That’s to be expected.“Reasons for concern” teachers also have nothing to worry about unless this rating persists for a number of years (probably at least 3). Exemplary teachers will occasionally get this rating, and satisfactory teachers will get it somewhat more frequently. Again, this is normal and should not give a teacher a heart attack!The ratings should be based partially on cohort-similar growth ratings on standardized tests, with a standard deviation range (or perhaps more) being considered “satisfactory”. As an example, you teach 9th grade biology. Your students have an average score of 27th percentile on a standardized science test they took in the 8th grade. The average student in the 27th percentile improves to a 35th percentile by the time he or she is a 10th grader. The standard deviation on that is 5, meaning that 68% of 10th graders will fall in the 30th to 40th percentile, if they started at the 27th as 9th graders. Any teacher whose average students started in the 27th and end up in the 30th to 40th would get a satisfactory rating in that portion of their evaluation. Above 40? Exemplary. Below 30? Reasons for concern.Other factors would also be considered, like parent and student evaluation of the teacher, random walkthroughs that look for things like student engagement, differentiation of instruction, student/teacher interaction, etc.Additional factors, such as percentage special education students, teacher’s experience with the course, teacher’s major or minor (for secondary), class size, etc. should also be considered.If all, or the majority (perhaps), of these factors point to “Reasons for concern”, then the teacher would be notified of the rating. This rating would not result in any punishment, loss of tenure or stature, etc. Instead, this teacher would qualify for additional assistance. For starters, that teacher would receive additional consideration with regards to scheduling (teaching courses in his or her major as opposed to minor, teaching a course that teacher had already taught) as well as having the option to attend additional professional development paid for by the district or state, being mentored by other teachers, etc. This teacher would be made to feel valued and supported, not shunned or scared.This teacher would continue to be monitored for improvement. Improvement would be expected in at least some areas over the course of 2–3 years.If improvement did not take place in the next 2–3 years, mandatory actions, such as additional professional development, additional supervision, lesson planning direction, etc. would be implemented.If those measures didn’t work, after perhaps 5 years, the teacher could be laid off, made part time, or terminated.Any year of satisfactory ratings would reset the clock, so to speak, giving a teacher additional time to improve.Even this complex system has one major flaws (and certainly several minor ones): half of the teachers are still below average. As you terminate your lowest teachers, the average moves up, putting teachers in a never-ending rat race that could find them satisfactory for decades, only to be fired at the end of their careers as the averages catch up with them.For this reason, I would suggest that, rather than going with averages, you set a bar at the current average and then leave it for some time. Every so often you re-evaluate the bar you’ve set, but potentially you don’t move it, or you don’t move it much. Let’s face it - when only the very best teachers are teaching, then anyone new will, by definition, be below average. That isn’t right, and it certainly doesn’t do a good job of recruiting new teachers.To sum up:In order to evaluate teachers effectively, you must:Make the evaluations multi-yearExpect average ratings from most of your staff.Expect below average ratings from most of your staff on occasion.Expect above average ratings from most of your staff on occasion.Support and lift up consistently underperforming teachers instead of demonizing and scorning them.Do the best that you can to consider mitigating factors and the all-important effects of random chance.Expect that this, like all systems, will sometimes penalize good teachers and reward bad ones.And, finally, all consideration of proficiency, attendance, promotion, and graduation rates must be removed from both teacher and school proficiency ratings.We educate all that come in the door, but they’re all different. A teacher making a good faith effort to enrich the lives of his or her students should, at worst, be provided with support, encouragement, resources, and additional training in order to further that teacher’s pursuit of excellence for enough time to allow that teacher to improve. At best, that teacher should be elevated to the status of “you really exceeded the average” and sought as a source of techniques and mentorship.Will this ever happen?No. It’s subjective, “touchy-feely”, and expensive and difficult to implement. But, so is teaching, so is learning, and so is life. There is no standardized test that measures student success - if there were, I’d say scrap everything you just read and use the test. But, time and again, students bomb tests and then live successful lives and, conversely, ace tests and then flounder through adulthood.Until such time (if that time ever comes) that an exceptionally accurate test can be created, you must resign yourself to the fact that teaching is messy, emotional, and hard. Teachers should be encouraged to do the best that they can, supported in their efforts to do so, and not penalized until every reasonable effort has been made to support them in their work.

There are two parts to the answer - the one you asked and one some humble $.2.Just a background on the second part, even before I answer the part 2, my father’s brother was severely mentally retarded, he passed away at the age of 31 about 15years back.Part -1: Clearly it is impossible to answer the question with any significant certainty without a professional evaluating the person - but still Down’s syndrome would be the first of the many(some related an unrelated) ailment that need to be consideredHigher levels of hormone, leptin, may contribute to the known higher risk of obesity among children and adults with Down syndrome.Part 2: Mental health disorders in India are the most stigmatised , as compared to any other disorder. Parents in general are extremely reluctant to acknowledge this to the outside world. Generally there are no medical cures for intellectual disability - so the incentive is almost non existent in acknowledging the issue.Lastly - Teachers, in India, have no training in handling special needs children. I’ll take the mental ability of a 5th grader with a pinch( a bucketful) of salt. It would be possible to have the situation you have mentioned in early years of education, but highly unlikely that 16/17 year old can have skills of an 10/11 year old and not be noticed and acted upon.