Pre Observation Conference Teacher: Fill & Download for Free

The sheer amount of administrative paperwork associated with the modern teaching profession. Teachers are drowning in a sea of acronyms, each one tied to a standard or expectation that can have a profound impact on a teacher’s performance evaluation, and each one requiring exhaustive amounts of paperwork to demonstrate that the teacher is meeting the standard.Gone are the days of trusting that a teacher actually knows how to teach, and can be trusted to do that job efficiently. Instead, everyone from state legislatures to the federal government to local school boards feel they have the absolute right to dictate instruction. And these dictates require massive amounts of paperwork and data collection. State legislatures make the law. Local school boards make policy. And in the end it all piles up into useless mounds of forms designed to collect data that no one will ever look at in a meaningful way.Don’t get me wrong, I am not opposed to data collection as an integral part of instruction. But when data collection and testing begin to take significant amounts of time away from instruction, it actually hinders student achievement.I’ll give an example. It is the fifth week of school in my district. I am scheduled to meet with my school administrator in a few days for my pre-observation conference. The paperwork I am expected to bring to this conference totals 18 pages and counting. By the time I am done with my observation cycle, I will generate more than 50 pages of forms, reflections, and data analysis. And I’m getting off easy. Probationary teachers (first year) are expected to complete THREE observation cycles, each with its own complete set of paperwork. No wonder so may teachers decide to leave the profession within the first few years.

Sometime about thirty years ago I attended an in-service for which the topic was “effective teaching.” The central theme of the speaker mirrored Bloom’s Taxonomy in that it derided lecturing favoring hands on learning. A week or so after this in-service I was due for an observation and evaluation and as was typical I was asked to attend a pre observation conference with my evaluator. One of the first question’s out of the assistant principal’s mouth was “what will you be lecturing about for the evaluation?” I stifled a chuckle and then explained to the administrator that I rarely lectured and that my classes were effective largely due to the degree of hands on learning employed. The administrator was clearly not impressed with my answer so I figured that just for him I’d cook up a fifty minute long lecture only for the purpose of the evaluation; if they wanted white bread, I’d give them white bread.Teachers who have been around for any length of time see in class observations as being little more than a “dog and pony” show wherein the teacher must jump through a series of hoops and expectations that have little to do with student learning. As time has worn on the entire teacher evaluation system has become increasingly time consuming, politically driven, and of questionable benefit to anyone involved. The phrase “data driven decision making” has come into vogue but is there any data that shows positive benefits from such ornate teacher evaluation systems?Having worked in industry before teaching I found teacher evaluations by comparison to be of little real consequence, just an exercise. In industry evaluations were infrequent and more motivating due to the incentives of raises or promotions. Employees were being evaluated for a raise or perhaps a promotion and not just due to a contractual requirement. Without an incentive what is the point? If all you are being evaluated for is as a determinant of continued employment is that not a disincentive? Are teacher evaluations a stick or a carrot? To most teachers observations are but another stick.

None.Now that I have your attention, allow me to clarify. “Observations”, as most teachers and principals understand the term, are pre-arranged visits to a classroom by a principal or his designee to observe and rate the teacher’s performance. The principal usually sits at the back of the room with a clipboard, taking copious notes. When I was observed, the shortest period was a half hour and the longest was an hour. 45 minutes was the norm. Sometimes, these visits are not pre-arranged; they are pop-ins, something my former principal preferred. But teachers’ unions are getting very effective at banning pop-in visits.Even before the actual observation, a teacher attends a pre-observation conference with the principal. She tells the him what she is planning and what he should see. She gives him some context for the lesson and a justification for why she is teaching it at that time. Veteran teachers know they will score points by asking the principal to be on the lookout for “such and such” and share their expertise about it at the post-observation conference.What happens during an observation is a dog-and-pony show. The teacher pulls out all the stops, planning the type of lesson you might see from a college student in a teacher prep course. She employs every Best Practices technique she can research. She tries to make sure everything is textbook perfect, and often types out an entire script to follow. It is not possible to teach like this all the time, nor is it preferable. (I discuss this in my book on pp. 291–294.) The kids know it’s a show, and for the most part, they participate willingly as a receptive audience, saying all the right things at the right times. After all, they performing for the principal!Then we have the post-observation conference, where the principal shares his take on what he observed and asks the teacher what she thought went well and what could use improvement. Since the teacher bent over backward to make sure everything went off flawlessly, this is a pointless enterprise. The savvy teacher has already built into her rehearsal for this meeting the thing she wants to “improve” upon, and talks about it in a humble way. She will further impress her evaluator if she asks him for his advice on what she could have done differently.The entire enterprise, observation and pre/post conferences, is a farce, and wastes valuable instruction and planning time. What should happen instead is that principals and their designees (such as vice principals) should be sticking their heads into classrooms regularly, without pre-arrangement, to gauge what is going on. These quick checks can take no more than 5 minutes, and if done at various times during the school day, will give the principal a good idea about the teacher’s teaching practices.If a teacher is about to teach a particularly interesting lesson or is just excited about her lesson, she can still invite the principal to her room, something I did often. Interestingly, my principal almost never took me up on that. I guess he was too busy attending meetings or performing his required observations of other teachers.Unfortunately, this whole dog-and-pony show style of evaluating teachers is not going away any time soon; the teachers’ unions establish strict evaluation procedures with the district, and basing an evaluation on what actually happens in a classroom throughout the day is not part of their plan.