For the length of my entire career there has been a supervisor (principal, assistant principal, master teacher, etc.) who would observe my class and provide feedback on my lessons. I get nervous about these interactions even after fifteen years of experience and I'm sure I always will to some degree. I love delivering knowledge to people and I try my hardest to present it in such a way that it is interesting and clear. It is a powerful thing to be able to show the world to someone in a way that they've never seen it before even though they are surrounded by it EVERY DAY! I, like any teacher, take pride in what I do and want to be as effective as I can at the career I love. Therefore, while I am nervous about my opportunities for feedback from my supervisor, I generally trust that the resulting conversations will help me improve in my chosen profession. This year has been a little different though. There hasn't been any sort of official feedback of any kind, neither as a teacher nor as an exchange participant.
First from the perspective of my exchange: I'm never really certain if what I'm doing is what they expect or if they are looking at me and thinking that I'm a bit of an exchange dud! There are three basic levels to evaluation: meeting expectations, exceeding expectations or not meeting expectations. The key word there is "expectation". I don't have a tangible sense of what the specific expectations are for me... that makes it difficult to self-evaluate and determine where I fall on that three tiered system! Maybe this should be liberating but I find it somewhat unsettling. As I pass and greet a cooperating teacher or the headmaster, I often have the thought "hmm, he didn't seem very friendly in that exchange... is that because he thinks I should be doing a better job or just because he is having a bad day?" This is not an effective system for judging my performance!
Secondly, from the perspective of someone who is in the classroom as a full-time teacher, this experience is very foreign. It is difficult to imagine a system that doesn't have someone come in and directly observe the most important parts of a teacher's career; connecting with, delivering content to and measuring the understanding of... STUDENTS! From my experience and comments from peers, Spain doesn't seem have a systematic teacher performance evaluation program at either the national, regional or school levels*.
Coming from a country that has grown obsessed with finding ever more meaningful and accurate metrics to use in teacher evaluations, it is strange to work in the absence of such a system (I'll leave the debate concerning the validity of those metrics to other blogs).
While state governments, union leadership, school boards and superintendents, teachers, parents and students alike discuss, debate and negotiate which metrics should be used and to what extent they should be valued in teacher evaluations; I have been teaching in Spain where not even so much as a supervisor's observations of a lesson are used as an evaluative tool. The evaluation of teacher performance for the determination of pay rate, probation or dismissal is less important to me than the feedback that is vital to guiding a teacher's professional development. I wonder, from where do Spanish teachers receive this feedback and what guidance, if any, do they get in identifying possible areas for training and other professional development (PD).
While I've been in Spain, I have been studying some of the aspects of the "new" evaluation system at BSD. It contains a seemingly inexhaustible list of measurables to define the criteria of an excellent teacher. I know when I return to my classroom in the States and I see the supervisor at the door as I start my lesson, I will still get a feeling of butterflies in my stomach. And, when the time comes for me to submit evidence that I have met various criteria of the evaluation system, I will wish it wasn't on my "To-Do" list and I will wish I had more time for all of the other pressing issues in my classroom. However, I can't imagine a system that didn't hold me accountable, that didn't seek to define my effectiveness in the arenas most critical to effective teaching, that didn't provide me with guidance for my own professional development.
*there is a school accreditation system but this seems to be focused on the school as a whole and not on the classroom performance of specific teachers
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