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Originally Posted by Ivorytickler
How about one who doesn't know their subject? In the sciences, there are some misconceptions that just won't die because there are teachers who teach them wrong or fail to address what students, commonly, mistake for correct (Like the earth having an elipitcal orbit around the sun. Adults graduate from college believing that one and it's incorrect.)
I can define lousy teachers as I had them. I had one who believed that, since I had scored high on an IQ test, I should have all the answers and no questions but I was the kid with all the questions and no answers. I spent half that year in the principals office and quit trying. She turned a straight A student described by her previous teacher as an "Intellecual sponge" into a D student in two short years. By the time I left her class, they had decided that I must be mildly retarded (they decided my IQ test was a fluke) and no one questioned the label until my ACT scores came in (not all that high but way out of line for my performance in school).
I almost crashed her retirement party just to tell her I was glad she was retiring and wouldn't be able to hurt any more kids like she did me but decide she wasn't worth going to jail over. I'm not sure I'd be able to control my temper if I was in the same room with her again. Why that woman was allowed to have a 30 year career in teaching and now collects 70% of her highest pay in retirement pay is beyond me. She should be paying her students for the damage she did.
You can watch teachers to see if they're engaging students and getting a lot of material taught. You can look at the grades of students incomming to their classroom and see how they do under them. Of course this takes effort on the part of administrators to evaluate the teachers. Which is antoher subject. I've been teaching all year and I have yet to have an evaluation. In industry, I was evaluated every 3 months my first year and every 6 months thereafter. They should be sitting in on my classes on a regular basis to make sure I'm on track with what the school wants.
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I agree with you 100% and it's a shame that had that experience with your teacher. Since I work in CA, and in a school district that's on a program improvement, they are literally watching us very closely in the classroom. I have lost count on the number of times my principal has come into my room to watch me teach. This year is my evaluation year, and I was observed by my assistant principal. I have to not only teach a lesson but show her how I HAVE DIFFERENTIATED THAT ONE LESSON FOR ALL OF THE DIFFERENT LEARNERS IN MY CLASS.
In my district, we have to give 3 benchmark assessments (given about once a trimester or every 6-8 weeks) to see where our students are, if any of our students are scoring below proficient, we as a grade level have twice a month PLC meetings to see how we are going to help that kid achieve. Then my principal meets with us as a grade level to see what we can do to help those kids improve, and I am talking about 60% of the students on my grade level. We come up with strategies that we share and agree to use on particular standards that our kids are weak in and determine whether or not it worked by giving our students an agreed upon common assessment after reteaching that standard.
What we as a grade level have discovered under the PLC model is that we all don't use the same strategies to teach the same standard. We all don't use the TE to teach the same standards, and we all have expertise in one area over the next teacher. After meeting, we discovered that the way I teach for example, figurative language to my students is that I start in the beginning of the year where my test scores are higher than my colleagues in that area because they wait til the middle of the year to teach that standard. My colleague teaches writing through telling stories, I use the district's guide to teach it, and yet my scores are lower than my colleague's.
To not be too long winded, we need to work together and get out of this I can do it on my own mentality, because we can't do it on our own, and we need to COLLABORATE MORE WITH OUR COLLEAGUES SO THAT WE ARE WORKING SMARTER AND NOT HARDER.
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