Evaluations That Help Teachers Learn By Charlotte Danielson

Henry Adams, an American historian, once said, “Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops”. A teacher influences a child’s life remarkably as they prepare a child for their future. For a child, school is considered as a second home since they spend half of their day at school. A child’s performances at school also influences his or her teacher’s ability. Government tends to evaluate public school teachers based on their students’ scores on standardized test scores. Standardized test is a test in which all the questions, format, instructions, scoring and reporting of scores are the same for all test takers. Standardized test has assumed a huge role to improve the quality of education. Both teachers and students feel
If teacher evaluation didn’t exist, teachers would not be given any guidance as to where they might have to focus to improve their teaching ability. Since public schools are public institutions and take money from public, the public has the right to ensure that all schools are getting high level education. If teachers are not evaluated accurately, the teachers may end up getting rated too high or too low. The main purpose for teacher evaluation is to ensure teacher quality and to promote professional development. Charlotte Danielson also talk about how teacher evaluations should be done fairly. Usually an administrator goes into the classroom, listens to the teachers lecture, write notes, goes away, write down the positive and negative aspect of the lesson and discusses it with the teacher. In this case, the only thing the teacher is doing is teaching the lesson and the administrator is doing rest of the work. So the teachers are not going to give enough value to the evaluation process and wouldn’t feel supportive of their teaching. “The process violates everything we know about learning— that learning is done by the learner through a process of active intellectual engagement” (Danielson, 2011). It is important to involve teachers in the process of evaluation so that they can find the process meaningful from which they can learn their mistakes. Both administrator and teacher should discuss the lesson together and decide on teacher’s strengths and weaknesses. The administrator should engage teacher in self-assessment and reflection. Both administrator and teacher should have a clear understanding about good teaching to provide a high quality