A Modest Proposal For Teacher Evaluation--Hopefully Swift but not Swift

In the spirit of the Diversity Fair, which took place at Neenah High School yesterday, I have a modest proposal. When I think of a Modest Proposal, the first thing that comes to mind is the Jonathon Swift version. My modest proposal is for education. Teachers spend countless hours helping students, whether directly, by meeting with them, or leading the class, but also outside of class time by planning, researching, grading and collaborating with other school personnel and community members.

Instead of giving teachers boxes to fill in with contrived examples and a rubric to follow and check boxes in an evaluation, what if we create an authentic experience and encourage them to experience productive failure?  What if instead of creating "goals" they are going to set for themselves and students, which are safe and easily accomplished, teachers were encouraged to make their goals big, hairy and audacious?

These moon shots should be documented in a way that is able to be shared publicly with other teachers, administrators and the community such as in a blog, website or some other method that is appropriate for the subject matter and the teacher.

One of the coveted things every teacher wants is time to share ideas with their colleagues. Setting up a time during a Professional Learning Day for teachers from different departments, grade levels, and buildings to truly share what they are doing, to encourage each other, and possibly pair up on some unit or learning and then reporting results would yield greater results and make everyone feel valued and encouraged. But that is not audacious enough, because that can be achieved through scheduling and more checking of boxes.

Goals which might be easily accomplished by one district may be moon shots for others. For my school, I am thinking something like taking a week of the school year and having every member of  school, adult and student, go to another country to do humanitarian outreach.  A couple of other ideas which quickly come to mind are: building houses or ensuring that every member of the school is truly imbued with skills which will help them throughout their lives, like building,  automotive, electronic and achieving balance by playing music, doing art among other options.

Maybe those goals aren't big enough, but they are a start.  They are better than trying to raise some behavior some amount, which is great, but in the end, I feel it is not enough.