Tips for Florida teachers: Don’t mess up in front of the boss
School teacher Lynn Bryan teaches language arts at Ponce de Leon Middle School.
At an annual training over the summer, Hialeah Senior High School writing teacher Kathy Pham and her colleagues heard what seemed like basic advice from the United Teachers of Dade: Make sure your principal observes you in the classroom this year. And if you have questions, schedule an appointment.
The stakes for teacher evaluations in Miami-Dade are rising, with questions about how evaluations can impact teachers’ pay and decisions about who could be fired.
Under a new Florida law, a data-driven formula—which calculates “value-added” scores for teachers based on their students’ standardized test results—will count for 50 percent of their ratings. Districts will decide
Complex new Florida teacher evaluations tied to student test scores
Orlando Sarduy is a math teacher at Coral Reef Senior High. He can understand the basics of the new, complex equation that will grade him and thousands of other teachers across Florida. But it won't grade him as a math teacher -- it will be tied to the school's FCAT reading scores. As Sarduy notes, the new evaluation system is one big experiment. Sarduy works with math students, Oct. 31, 2011. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald)
At Coral Reef Senior High, calculus teacher Orlando Sarduy understands complicated formulas, and knows he will be graded on how his students perform on tests.
But despite his advanced knowledge of math, Sarduy cannot explain the statistics-packed formula behind the