Water Conservation Education Program Evaluation Form: Fill & Download for Free

Hello! Thank you for the question…….A career in geography can nourish your analytical skills and make you eligible for a number of good opportunities???Often directly relating to a geography degree, and working with the world around you, these careers link directly to many of the modules available to you through the Geography department. They build on the skills and knowledge learnt directly from your modules. Many roles in this sector will require the use of mapping or analysis software.Getting into these careers may rely on having the appropriate skills from the modules you choose, so think about this when choosing subjects throughout your degree.Cartographeris the study and practice of making maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.Climate Change AnalystClimate change analysts evaluate scientific data and research concerning the climate to create models and predictions about what could happen to the Earth's climate in the future.ClimatologistA climatologist studies weather patterns over a period of time. Their work is similar to that of meteorologists but focuses on a much longer timescale, studying trends over months, years or even centuries.Emergency Management SpecialistEmergency management specialists’ co-ordinate disaster response and crisis management, through planning, assessment and vulnerability analysis. They are also responsible for education programs and organising training.GeomorphologistGeomorphologists study how the earth’s surface is formed and changed by rivers, mountains, oceans, air and ice. The role involves a large amount of fieldwork and research.Geospatial analystGeospatial analysis is a growing field of jobs analysing geographic data for a wide variety of employers and sectors. The role includes analysis of data, design of databases and use of this data in other GIS applications.GIS specialistDepending on the company and sector you are working in, the role of a GIS specialist can vary. Generally, they are involved in producing and analysing data to plan and deliver services and products. GIS is used in a wide range of areas including construction, oil, gas, water, telecoms, electricity, the environment, healthcare, transport planning and operation, defense, retail location planning and logistics, national park management, insurance and finance. A wide range of jobs are available in the public, private and third sectors.HydrologistHydrologists work in managing, monitoring and protecting water and water resources. They can be involved in planning, development and sustainable use of natural and domestic water resources. They use detailed data sources, computer modeling and other resources to collect, analyse and interpret data. They ensure the safe, sustainable and environmentally sound management of water resources.Location analystLocation analysts can be involved in many areas of business operations. The job may include site research, marketing, market intelligence, property planning and research, retail, facilities, operations, planning and acquisitions.MeteorologistMeteorologists (weather forecasters) are not just the weather presenters you see on the TV, they also do a lot of the study and research that goes into creating those forecast. They study the causes of weather conditions using information from land, sea and the atmosphere. They use this information alongside mathematical and computerised models to make long and short range forecasts of weather and climate patterns, which are used by industry, government and the public to inform decisions.Pollution AnalystPollution analysts work in natural and urban environments to ensure pollution levels are within standards set by UK and EU legislation.Remote Sensing AnalystRemote sensing analysts work with data measured from satellite or aircraft to infer what it means about the world, presenting maps and other information to display the results. The role may also involve some fieldwork to corroborate the findings by taking field measurements.Soil ConservationistSoil conservationists are responsible for ensuring a health state of the soil. They spend a large proportion of their time working in the field, alongside farmers and other land users, offering conservation planning and technical help. Aims include conserving the soil, improving water quality, managing nutrients, and protecting and improving wildlife habitats.SurveyorThe title of surveyor can cover many different jobs. Land surveyor, minerals surveyor, buildings surveyor, quantity surveyor, commercial surveyor, residential surveyor and others come under this heading and do slightly different types of work.Town plannerPlanners make decisions about the management and development of cities, towns, villages and the countryside. They aim to balance the conflicting demands of housing, industrial development, agriculture, recreation, transport and the environment, in order to allow appropriate development to take place.Water conservation officerWater conservation officers have the expertise necessary to assess environmental impacts of land use changes on the area and its wildlife.

This is a question that has been researched, debated, fought over, and studied some more for decades.There are some best practices that have come out of that study.The first thing that anyone who really wants to know how to evaluate teachers for quality truly has to understand is this:You must decouple student outcomes from teacher evaluation.It’s a counter-intuitive thing to say. It’s anathema to those who view education the way we have viewed it for the better part of the last century: through a factory model that aims to spit out students who all fit a certain standard set of molded criteria.But the test scores show… no, dammit. Put the tests results down for a minute. We can come back to those. But they don’t have a lot to do with whether or not someone is a good teacher.The problem is that we do evaluate most of the adult world by work product and outcomes. And thus we want to evaluate educators the same way.Education is unlike any other form of professional work.Every child is unique. Every child has a unique situation. Every child has unique talents, and unique handicaps.Many of them live in poverty. I had students who had to work forty hours a week, after school, to help pay the bills for their family. You think they’ll do well on the state test when they’re not 100% sure where their next meal will come from?I had students whose parents are drug addicts, and so they have to try to support their siblings. You think they care about Shakespeare when they’re not sure whether they’ll have hot water for a shower because Mom spent the electric bill on pills again? These kids are just trying to survive.Even children in stable homes have unique challenges and talents.I had a student who was in a remedial language arts course. She was failing literally everything but art. She wanted to be a comic book graphic artist. Her writer’s notebook was filled with various doodles. She was allowed to design her own project for one unit, and chose to turn the play we were reading into a graphic novel. Her teachers sent me alarmed and angry emails, because she was more tuned out than normal in their classes and was drawing something that she told them was for my class. Three days after I green-lit her project, she presented me with a fully-inked, colored graphic novel of Romeo and Juliet. She’d read the play, on her own, and when she couldn’t understand it, found a modern translation, read it, and created a 50+ page extremely professionally produced version of the play. I encouraged her to try to get it published. I don’t know if she ever did. I think it was the only A she received in my class.This girl could be wildly successful in the world, but her test scores will never reveal that. Her student outcomes will make me look like a failure of a teacher, and every other core teacher in her coursework.And yet, when given the chance to prove her mastery over the standards through her own means, she was able to do so with remarkable success.So, looking at the student outcomes, am I a great teacher, or a shitty teacher?Not to mention that how we assess students does not produce results that in any way reflects the quality of their educators.This will be stuck in your head for the next six hours. You’re welcome.I’ve written several answers and a 70 page legal policy journal article on all of this. I don’t think you want me to cut and paste it here. But trust me: high-stakes testing is utterly useless for showing a) what students actually know, and b) the quality of their educators.Also, stop handcuffing teachers.As Daniel Kaplan’s excellent answer points out, there are dozens of things that sucked up my instructional time or affected my students outside the classroom that I had no control over. Especially in language arts, because that was a class that everyone had to take every year of high school, and they couldn’t justify sucking that time away from the math department, whose proficiency scores were worse than ours. The last year I taught, I calculated that I lost 17.5 hours of scheduled instructional time to the military recruitment day, STARR testing, pep rallies, lockdown drills, you name it.To effectively cover every single standard, and mind you that the Common Core State Standards are pared down compared to previous state standards, would require about 30% more instructional time than I am allotted in a year. Without crippling me by taking that instructional time away for other stuff.A student’s educational success depends so much on the external factors on the student that I have zero control over as a teacher, and on how you actually assess the student.So, stop assessing teachers by student outcomes and stop handcuffing us while you do.Hmm… maybe student and parent evaluations? I mean, you can tell a great teacher by how many students love them, right?Using student and parent evaluations incentivizes teachers to be liked, not to be good teachers.One of the very first things that I learned as a teacher, back when I was still doing my practicum work under observation, was that there is a big difference between being liked and being respected, and that students and parents like teachers who don’t actually challenge them to do anything of substance.I’m serious.The best reviews I got as a teacher were when I stopped assigning homework and we read a book in class with discussion at the end of every chapter.I don’t actually believe it’s because students are lazy by nature, though that’s often the implication. No, I think it’s because students, and parents, are so overwhelmed these days, that they don’t understand the value in what gets assigned. It all seems like busywork.And what’s good for students isn’t always what makes parents happy.That unit I ran with the graphic artist girl?Every student got to design their own projects. I assigned no busywork. No tests. No quizzes. I gave the students eight learning targets and a rubric about what various levels of competency ranging from mastery to minimal competency looked like, and gave the students free rein to decide how to show me they got there. I had tests and quizzes as backups if they couldn’t think of anything.In three weeks, every student reached at least proficiency on every standard in the curriculum required by that unit. Every. Single. One. In a class of remedial students not reading at grade level.I was elated. And the principal who had okayed my experiment for this unit came to my office because half a dozen parents wanted me fired. They couldn’t understand how I’d graded it. They could not wrap their heads around the standards-based grading model, even with my parent packet on it.All the screaming about “Common Core Math” is another perfect example of parents who do not understand either standards nor instructional strategies and who are freaking out because they don’t know how to help their kids with their homework, even though these instructional strategies are being taught because they are proven to help students make better sense of mathematical concepts and advance in mathematics more quickly.Most students will evaluate me highly if they feel like there’s value to what I’m doing in the classroom and that they are making real, actual progress. Most parents will do the same.But a lot of these parents and students aren’t ready for the changes required to make a classroom that incorporates educational best practices, and will evaluate a teacher poorly for that. Well, that’s not what Mrs. Smith does!The math teacher next to me in one district had been teaching for 24 years. She wasn’t a great teacher. She’d used the same laminated lesson plans for 22 of those 24 years. Her test scores were… okay. She taught to the test. She never rocked the boat. She usually assigned the standard 20 math problems for homework that didn’t have answers in the back of the book. She graded her tests with a laminated piece of paper that had the correct answers cut out so all she had to was glance at the sheet and check off right ones. I never saw her at work after 3:30 PM except for parent-teacher conferences.Her students were utterly bored in class, every day. But that was the expectation.I guarantee you those students didn’t take anything away from that class that they used in daily life.Her evaluations were always fine. Student and parent.I challenged my students, every day. I made them think. I made them grapple with concepts. I made them write, a lot. I made them evaluate. I made them evaluate themselves. Probably 80% of my students gave me four or five out of five on my of my evaluations.About 5% of my students hated doing that level of work. I got terrible reviews from them. 0–1 out of 5. (These were usually the parents who wanted me fired.)On the whole, I probably had more 5/5 evaluations than the math teacher. And I certainly had more 0–1/5 reviews. Our averages were probably about the same when all the math came out, I’d guess.But I had students who looked me up years later to tell me how something we talked about in class, some project I made them do, some piece of writing I made them draft or read, had made them a better person. Had made them think. Had come up in conversation at college or work. How To Kill a Mockingbird or Monster made them think about injustices in the world that they saw.None of that showed up in the evaluations, I can tell you.Who’s the better teacher?I mean, I’m gone, and she’s still there.So, who’s the better teacher?And who deserves a raise?So, what does that leave us?Educational researcher Charlotte Danielson asked precisely that same question.There are two bits of research that truly helped me to understand the model and principles of master educators, which can be effectively assessed; the Danielson Framework and Dr. Robyn Jackson’s book Never Work Harder than Your Students. The key takeaway of both of these is simple.Create measurable standards for educational best practices, provide these to teachers, and allow them to show how they meet mastery of those standards.Danielson’s framework is meant to evaluate whether educators are engaging in educational best practices such that they are putting students in the best possible position to succeed.[1] The research she did found that there are core domains of teaching, and that there are specific markers of successful teachers in those domains that can be objectively observed and assessed.In particular, Danielson identified four domains of educational practice:Planning and PreparationClassroom EnvironmentInstructionProfessional ResponsibilitiesWithin each of these domains are specific aspects of teaching that can be assessed. For example, under Planning and Preparation, Danielson identified:1a Demonstrating Knowledge of Content and Pedagogy1b Demonstrating Knowledge of Students1c Setting Instructional Outcomes1d Demonstrating Knowledge of Resources1e Designing Coherent Instruction1f Designing Student AssessmentsThese are all things that are within educators control. And Danielson created these assessments of educator’s practices in such a way as to provide them with a great deal of academic freedom in the individual classroom. She identified objective markers that delineate emerging, minimally competent, proficient, and master teachers.Administrators are trained on how to observe these characteristics. Administrators usually spend one to three course periods a year in the teacher’s classroom doing a detailed observation of the execution of a single lesson plan. Danielson also requires “drive-by” unannounced observations of a few minutes.The rest comes from teachers putting together a portfolio of evidence ranging from lesson plans and curriculum design to videos of student engagement in the classroom.One of my favorite videos that I ever used in one of these portfolios was a lesson where I let the students go nuts. I gave them a small task to draft the best possible form of a certain response to a question and essentially no rules to complete it other than “you can’t bribe or threaten me.” They could work in small groups. They could work individually. They could work as a class. I told them to think about how to handle moochers that didn’t contribute if they decided to work in groups, since they’d all be turning in individual versions of this. The purpose of the lesson was to introduce The Lord of the Flies and the ideas of factions and leadership. One student who looked at my stated daily objectives on the board in the back actually made the connection. It was great. The students were engaged. We had an excellent debrief. Master lesson plan.Also, I’m fairly confident, I’d say within 90%, that no administrator ever watched that video or reviewed my portfolio in any meaningful way. It took me over 40 hours of work, on my own time, to construct that portfolio. It was never so much as referenced in my quarterly evaluations. And I can’t say I blame them: it took me 40 hours to put it together. How much time to review it? If it’s even 10% of the time to review it, (more than that was just video documentation, but let’s say they put it on fast-forward,) then they’re at 4 hours per teacher. I was in a small district, and there were over 50 teachers in the school. 200 hours. Just to review the portfolios. Conservative estimate. Yup… I get it. I understand, admins.The second piece of research that really influenced my understanding of what it looks like to be a master teacher was Dr. Robyn Jackson’s Never Work Harder than Your Students.[2] Dr. Jackson identifies seven principles of master educators.Start where you students are.Know where your students are going.Expect to get your students there.Support your students along the way.Use feedback to help you and your students get better.Focus on quality rather than quantity.Never work harder than your students. (Understand what their job is and what your job is, and don’t do their work for them.)Within each of these, she explains how master teachers understand and apply these principles. These can be objectively evaluated. Teachers can set specific goals to incorporate these principles into their professional work. Doing all seven at once is suicide, but one or two a year of dedicated focus is doable.And that basically brings me to my last point:Give teachers time and ability to show progress.No teacher ever became a master teacher in their first or second year. And teachers may have been coasting for ten years before being given a good model of what a master educator looks like.You have to give teachers time to show improvement, and you have to give them the flexibility and freedom to show that improvement.That means, if you want to reward those really great teacher and fire those really shitty teachers, it’s going to take a number of years. People don’t really have a lot of patience, I’ve found. They want that bad teacher gone yesterday. They don’t want to give them a chance to improve.The single most important thing I found about veteran teachers who made it to become master teachers is that they either were able to fly under the radar and make few enough waves to survive that long, or were stubborn fighters long enough to survive that long.My father was one of the latter. When he started, there were fistfights in the grocery store between parents who wanted him gone and parents who liked him. School board members showed up to our house in the dead dark of night, telling my father that he couldn’t give up and that he had to keep fighting for his job, but that they would deny that they were there if anyone asked. My father walked out of a principal’s office saying, “Fire me if you want. I’m going back to work right now.” I can’t believe he was never canned for insubordination.By the time he retired, he was widely acknowledged as one of the nation’s great educators in music. He’d been recognized as Citizen of the Year and given numerous awards from educational institutions. His choirs had won national competition titles, been invited to the Lincoln Center and to sing at the American Choral Directors Association conference.And even in his final year, there were parents who wanted him fired.My dad figures it took him about twelve years to really start to have a successful program that was consistently recognized as an outstanding program by his peers.I gave up on secondary education after about six years, three full time. By many accounts, I was a pretty good teacher. I wouldn’t call myself a master teacher, because I don’t think I was there long enough to earn that title. Maybe with another five or ten years of practice, I might have started to approach the outward edges of that. Maybe.But if you want to eradicate the “bad” teachers and give bonuses to the “good” teachers every year, you’re going to need probably ten years of data to really sort them apart.I’m going to tell you right now, nobody making the decisions has that level of patience.Thanks for the A2A.Footnotes[1] https://www.danielsongroup.org/framework/[2] Never Work Harder Than Your Students and Other Principles of Great Teaching, 2nd Edition

I’d love to hear Bernie explain this “crisis” in detail. Beyond the platitudes like “free college for all”, exactly what about the current student loan situation is he referring to, and why would we turn over yet more of our individual liberty to this charlatan to “fix” a problem he helped create in the first place?After listening to Bernie for two election cycles now, one of my sharpest criticisms of him in general is that he’s always trying to substitute his judgment for that of “we the people”, as though Americans are incapable of making basic decisions for ourselves. In our system, politicians exist to secure and protect our rights, not lord over the people because somehow the heavy hand of government is preferable to individual liberty.To believe in many of Bernie’s policies, you first have to believe that a certain group of Americans are too stupid to make decisions on their own. We’re told consumers are too stupid to decide whether a bank’s credit cards are too expensive, so the bank needs to be regulated. We’re told we can’t decide for ourselves whether we want particular medical insurance coverage, so the government must tell us what we need - even if we don’t want it. We can’t be trusted to buy energy-efficient light bulbs, so alternatives have to be legislated out of existence.The list goes on and on, and in every case what you find are politicians substituting government control in place of individual freedom. When a government gets to the point of telling you how much water you can use in your shower, what your kid is allowed to eat at school, what you have to study in school and that 60-year old women need to pay for maternity benefits in their health insurance, trust me: things are out of control.Let’s think about the “student debt crisis” in a little more detail…To be clear, there is a crisis in terms of the performance of the loans “we the people” guaranteed for countless students. Today, over 40 million Americans have borrowed over $1.5 trillion, about 11% are delinquent and about an equal number have outright defaulted, saddling taxpayers with the bill. Worse, easy availability of student loans allows colleges and universities to raise tuition without fear of losing students, since nearly any student that would be admitted to college also qualifies to borrow massive sums of money at no risk to the lender or school.In other words, we have the typical results of government intrusion into a free market:Injecting money into a market disrupts supply-and-demand, driving prices up for everyone. Under the current program, cost of tuition and fees at most American universities has climbed at a rate that’s more than double the overall inflation rate.Government intrusion has made many universities significantly more profitable at taxpayer expense. According to noted researcher Vance Fried (Federal Higher Education Policy and the Profitable Nonprofits), many universities earn a profit of $11,000–12,000 per student, although it is typically hidden in the form of reinvestments in the school, funding research programs and so forth. These profits don’t accrue because of the hard work and success of the university - they occur because of government subsidies, guaranteed loans and so forth.By taking the risk away from lenders and creating a “right” to higher education, loans are made to people that would otherwise be too risky, and eventually the taxpayer ends up with this debt.Providing students easy access to money makes it easy for marginal students to attend college, and many don’t finish - they get the debt, but not the education. As is typical in government programs, we spend more and get less.Nothing new or unexpected here - we’ve seen these results at a state level in response to the free college education programs in states like NY and California. In California, for example, over half of all currently-enrolled students are attending college for free, up dramatically since 2000. While some might applaud this, the results have been predictably poor. Graduation rates are dramatically lower, costs have risen for ineligible students, educational standards are lower due to overcrowding, and discipline issues have become more commonplace as schools are flooded with students just looking to get their “free stuff” rather than actually pursuing an education. And while all of this goes on, the universities just get more profitable (see Non-profit Colleges Can Be Very Profitable — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal).Yet again, we get exactly the opposite of what government promises it’s gullible subjects, and now Bernie wants to extend these poorly performing programs to the nation as a whole.There was a time when student loans were the funding of last resort…parents spent what they could, smart students got various scholarships and grants - and the last gap was filled with debt. Now, we’ve turned this on it’s head…debt is frequently the first and preferred funding model, and when there’s no risk for making these loans and little penalty for not paying them back, the result is the chaos we see today. Government stepped in, distorted a market, and left “we the people” with the bill.There are of course two approaches to tackling the student debt crisis. The more conservative approach would be to evaluate what we’ve done and reign in the stuff that’s not working. Perhaps the criteria for student loans should be tighter so that only qualified students are accepted. Perhaps risk shouldn’t be borne 100% by the taxpayer, but shared with the bank and school. Perhaps there should be restrictions on what schools can spend taxpayer dollars on to create pressure for universities to keep tuition and fees from increasing faster than the inflation rate. Perhaps there should be means-testing and better tax incentives so that otherwise wealthy families choose to finance their children’s education in other ways. Perhaps there needs to be greater emphasis on collection, too.Then there’s the socialist’s way, and it amounts on doing more of the same. We see poor results at the state level when free education becomes accessible to more people…so let’s double-down on that and pump even more money into the system. We’ll continue letting our friends in academia continue to reap big profits, and by giving “free stuff” to a people that don’t understand what they’re giving up, we’ll get power and control in return.One of the more perverse points about Bernie’s proposals is how “regressive” they are. In America, about one-third of our citizens attend college, and this tends to be heavily concentrated at the top of the income scale. By essentially nationalizing higher education in the US, Bernie is in effect saying that the lower two-thirds need to contribute to the education for the top one-third. So much for socialism helping the “little guy”.It’s also odd that the student issue is so out of whack with the rest of Bernie’s approaches. When he talks about banks taking advantage of people, he wants to regulate banks. Yet, when universities take advantage, it’s the taxpayer that is to be punished. Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t see Bernie saying that universities need to have the price of tuition regulated, or that if students don’t achieve he expects, school administrators need to be held legally accountable. Why is that?The other unfortunate result of government intrusion into education is that it gives government clout to influence academic policies according to their political whims. A generation ago, we saw affirmative action programs telling universities who to accept and who not to accept. We see Title IX impacting school sports programs to meet government criteria. We saw Obama threaten public schools with DoJ investigations if they were found to be disciplining minority students at higher rates than white students. We may agree with some of these outcomes, but is it really the role of government to run various aspects of the schools?Bottom line is that it’s unfortunate that politicians think student debt has become an issue they can use to draw votes. Suddenly, we get all sorts of dubious ideas that are ultimately designed to win elections, not solve problems. The facts are all there for anyone to see, but when sugar-coated in Marxist euphemisms, people driven by greed and a desire for “free stuff” from the government become all too eager to abandon the individual liberty and self-reliant principles that made America great.Too bad for us if we fall for it…