ASCD Conference Highlights: Day 2
My second day at the ASCD Conference in Chicago brought another good variety of interactions and learning opportunities. (Read about Day 1 highlights here). I started the day at the ASCD Forum, which gave ASCD leadership a chance to engage with conference attendees both live and virtual around discussions of teacher and principal effectiveness and how to assess it. The forum was organized around a series of questions, each answered in brief from a selected teacher and principal before opening the floor to participant responses. Among those responding were individuals coming from administration, research, and teacher training. I wish we could have had some testing and value-added advocates participating or at least listening, because it’s time for them to recognize how far off course they are, how out of step with educational research and leadership. An assistant superintendent from Utah put it bluntly when she commented that test-based evaluation is not just a bit flawed, but actually counterproductive in teacher evaluation and improvement. “The system is going to implode,” she remarked, and no one seemed to disagree at all.The same event included observations that should be troubling to anyone concerned about the training and development of new teachers: with the use of test scores in evaluations, teachers are increasingly reluctant to take on student teachers, as the students’ test scores will be attributed to the mentor teacher regardless of the student teacher’s effectiveness. I actually heard this observation multiple times yesterday in unrelated conversations, discussing different locations.