All of Portage Township Schools’ approximately 400 teachers were rated as effective or highly effective this school year, but school and teachers union officials still want to fine-tune their evaluation system.
“From the beginning, the teachers and the administrators have been working collaboratively to say we want to create an evaluation system that celebrates good teaching, that differentiates what a good teacher and a highly good teacher does,” said Myers Elementary Principal Jeff King, who delivered the evaluation results to the school board recently.
“We’ve had really good buy-in by everyone involved, because it was everyone’s process, everyone’s rubric.”
Three years ago, about 30 teachers and 15 administrators formed a committee to determine how the district would evaluate its teachers. The group decided to build its own evaluation process, instead of using the Indiana Department of Education’s Rise evaluation model, to achieve state standards.
The group hammered out a process that had principals and assistant principals visiting each classroom in their schools for two announced, or expected, observations and two “walk-throughs,” or unscheduled visits.
King said the administrators rate teachers’ performances based on four skill areas: teacher planning and preparation for lessons; instruction, or the actual teaching; how well teachers manage their classrooms and build relationships with students; and professional responsibility, or a teachers’ willingness to improve themselves and others around them.
Some elements are given more weight than others because they offer “more bank for the buck,” King said. For example, instruction and classroom management carry more weight than planning and professional responsibility, he said.
Following the visits, administrators have conferences with teachers, sharing the results of their observations, acknowledging teachers’ strengths and opportunities for professional development, King said.
In the Portage evaluation, teachers are rated as ineffective, needing improvement, effective or highly effective.
“We’re not looking at this as a ‘gotcha game,’ ” he said. “We’re not looking at it as trying to say where am I going to find something wrong. It’s about relationships and coaching opportunities.”
King said he believed the biggest difference between the Portage evaluation model and the IDOE’s Rise model is the high level of collaboration between teachers and administrators in developing the local plan.
The Rise model also is more time-intensive for both teachers and administrators, he said.
The teachers union, the Portage Association of Teachers, has been on board with the evaluation process from the beginning, but the group also is looking for improvements to the plan, said union President Deb Porter, a music teacher.
The teachers union represents about 300 of the district’s 400 teachers.
She described the Portage schools model as “a very good rubric, but the devil’s in the details, like how a (area of measurement) is worded or what it means. Any bit of fuzziness on how a phrase can be interpreted, we tried to fix that.”
The model still takes more time than many teachers would like, Porter said. Also, streamlining the process might make the evaluations less of “a dog and pony show.”
“The question is can we do this with fewer observations? We can make it less cumbersome for principals and teachers, who have to plan lessons and prepare for planned observations,” she said.
Schools Superintendent Richard Weigel described the Portage evaluation process as “satisfactory” and a good example of collaboration between teachers and administrators.
What evaluations cannot measure, but that are important in the classroom, are the intangibles of effective teaching, he said.
“You can’t teach heart, you can’t mandate heart,” Weigel said. “We have teachers who come in early, stay after school and are really, really dedicated.”
Michael Gonzalez is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
