I play well with others. At least, that's what I've been told. Maybe that's why Linda Darling-Hammond's assertion that in order to effectively train and evaluate teachers they should be allowed and encouraged to collaborate makes perfect sense to me. Darling-Hammond (who has yet to write anything I don't find absolutely interesting, by the way) and other educators briefed politicians in Washington, D.C. last month about the most effective ways to evaluate teachers. She, and her team, found flaws in the value-added methods (VAM) that are increasingly being touted as the right way to evaluate teachers. Among their alternative measures to helping creating effective teachers was the focus on collaboration. First, however, a brief digression into the VAM. VAM seem a positive alternative to continuing to turn our backs on the trainwreck that is NCLB. But they, like other evaluation measures, need to be taken with a grain of salt...apparently in somewhat frequent doses throughout the school year. Perhaps the most interesting piece of the VAM puzzle is the way that students' scores are seemingly effected by (get this) students. This is interesting because most legislators, it seems, think students live in a bubble, effected only by the quality of the teacher (lots of parents feel this way as well). However Darling-Hammond's research suggests that the actual students - that is their backgrounds, home-life, peer culture, health, and attendance - amazingly impact there own education.
Okay, enough sarcasm. You know this already. I know this, and I think that when we actually question legislators, they might admit it as well. So what to do? Evaluate, train, monitor, and collaborate. Rinse and repeat. This means thinking about evaluation in a different way. This does not mean that adding values to students shouldn't be a portion of the measure to teacher evaluation. Nor is it saying that in order to be a good teacher you need to play well with others and collaborate all time. Instead, I'm asserting that both of these methods share value when it comes to evaluating teachers. So too is proper training, and continued monitoring of both novice and experienced teachers. All four pieces carry significant importance when it comes to gauging the effectiveness of teachers and wht it is that students are taking from their experiences with their teachers.
As far as collaboration though, I tend to agree with Darling-Hammond, et. al., that playing nice with others carries with it extreme value in the context of educating students. The idea of a teacher working (and teaching) in a vaccum is no longer feasible in an era of technological innovation, high stakes testing, accountability, and nationwide standards. Closed doors are closed minds. My first teaching experience, I was lucky enough to have the same sophomore English prep as another first year teacher, and a second year teacher who had taught at the district the year before. The three of us worked together to align curriculum, develop lessons, and, if need be, let off steam, at least once a week. This period of collaboration helped to save my already-taxed first-year teacher mind from overload. It was a necessary element of my survival. So too was my role in a mentoring program that required an experienced mentor teacher to sit in on my classroom once a week. We would then meet about what went on during the observed lesson later on in the week. I enjoyed the opportunity to pick specific areas to improve upon every week, and my mentor's feedback was invaluable to my improvement as a teacher. Both instances of collaboration benefitted me greatly, and both would still benefit me, even as a more experienced educator.
Collaboration is benefitting other experienced teachers as well. I read recently that other educationally progressive countries actually build collaborative time into their teachers' weekly schedules, sometimes up to five hours a week. The increased collaboration leads to teacher's evaluating other teachers in their classes, reflection on lesson planning and outcomes, and perhaps most importantly, students showing growth in the classroom. I would love to do something similar on a weekly basis with teachers in my department - whether it was aligning curriculum, planning, sharing resources, or doing more reflective practice by observing one another for both evaluative (formative) and learning (novice teacher views experienced teacher) purposes. This sort of colloborative effort could end up being another measure of a teacher's worth in an educational landscape of accountability.
