COMPASS ideas keep coming in…
Teachers around Louisiana are responding to the LFT’s call for ideas to improveCOMPASS’ the teacher evaluation system.
Here’s a recent comment:
Practically all teachers in all grade levels of all content intensive subjects are graded
according to the same rubric, which requires very specific practices to be displayed during
classroom observation. This is completely artificial. The most appropriate techniques for
teaching 9th grade English are quite different from those that would be most effective in
12th grade physics.
As an example of the previous, group work might be appropriate for lower grade levels,
but it is NOT appropriate for seniors who are about to go into college science classes
where they will have to work independently.
As another example, students are supposed to ask probing and insightful questions.
However, in a content intensive area like science, they probably do not know what
questions to ask! It is much more effective for the teacher to use the Socratic method to
question them rather than wait for them to figure out what questions to ask.
To summarize:
If we are going to use rubrics to evaluate teachers, each subject and grade level should
have its own rubric.