Innovative Plan Appears Promising
Imagine being a brand-new public school teacher and listening to the endless chitchat about what’s wrong with schools and what must be done to fix them. Are reformers offering what teachers need?
For example, it’s popular these days to bury the kids in tests. Test the second graders, the fourth graders, the fifth graders, the seventh graders, the 10th graders. Test them with local tests, state tests, national tests, innovative tests, standardized tests. Evaluate the kids with a new, improved, 42-point report card. And if there’s time, don’t forget to teach reading, writing, math, history, science and the arts, so the kids can get good test scores.
Teach? How?
The answer is complex, human, subjective. No one-size-fits-all regulation can provide it.
Yet education is only as good as teachers are.
Teachers vary in their abilities, personalities and styles.
What if reformers set out to help individual teachers get better at their most important skill? Namely, teaching.
In Bellevue School District, the school board today will hire three of the district’s finest teachers for a new role: mentoring and evaluating the district’s other teachers.
The mentors, nominated by their peers, will pass along the tricks of their trade.
This is quite a change. Usually, principals evaluate teachers’ classroom performance. But many principals haven’t taught for years and were promoted for their managerial skills, not necessarily their teaching skills. Plus, principals have an authoritarian role that makes mentoring tough.
So Bellevue this fall adopted a peer approach to mentoring and evaluation. Its new system, unique in Washington state, is modeled after one used in Ohio, in Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo.
Mentor teachers have two assignments. First, they’ll work one-on-one with new teachers, giving them practical help and advice. Second, when principals sense that any teacher is struggling, one of the mentors will get involved and help the teacher improve - or, if that fails, document a case for the teacher’s removal.
After a few years, the full-time mentors will return to the classroom and a new group of master educators will take their place.
It’s a fascinating idea. Teacher unions, tired of the perception that they protect bad teachers, like it. Bellevue’s union helped design the system. Spokane’s teacher union soon may offer to help create a similar system here. Good. Peer evaluations address a forgotten issue in school reform: better teaching, one teacher at at a time.
Education is an art, and any art is best learned from a master.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster For the editorial board