Eight teachers, eight struggles with measuring student growth
Take eight certified teachers, all with a prestigious advanced teaching credential, and ask them to tell stories about how they measure student growth in their classrooms— a requirement of the state’s new teacher evaluation system.
These are some of our most accomplished instructors — teachers who care a lot about how much their students learn. Yet most admit that, at first, they tried to game the system or find an easy, if meaningless, way to show growth.
As Lindsey Stevens, a high school teacher in Sumner, put it:
Teachers were literally joking (I hope) about grading everything ridiculously hard the first time, and then just being easier on the kids the next time. They would say, write your goal in a way you can’t go wrong, then no matter what happens you look like a rock star.
Paul Tong / Op Art
Tom White, a fourth-grade teacher in the Edmonds School District, did just that — making sure students did badly on a fall test so that their later scores would almost certainly rise. He called his approach “cheaching,” saying it was bad, but not all that different from what other professionals do to make themselves look good. (And he pointed out he only did this when such scores didn’t count.)
But along with way, most of the eight found that their methods backfired, failed or just weren’t satisfying, and they came up with new ways to track growth that helped their students.
All their stories — a written essay, and a short video from each teacher, can be found here.
They were gathered by the Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession, a Washington state group with a mission to help teachers’ voices be heard in debates about education. The Center told the teachers to be honest, said executive director Nasue Nishinda, and they worked for months to write their essays.
White said he stopped cheaching when he started collaborating with a special education teacher, and realized that real data helped him uncover student weaknesses that he then could do Eight teachers, eight struggles with measuring student growth | Education Lab Blog | Seattle Times: