During the evaluation process, teachers might be asking for one thing while evaluators are looking for something different. How do we bring these two perspectives together to reach common goals? In Making Teacher Evaluation Work, Authors Rachael Gabriel and Sarah Woulfin suggest there’s a way to not only improve the evaluation process, but use evaluations as a way to improve teaching. Rachael and Sarah have created a resource for teachers and evaluators to read together that walks them through every step of the evaluation process. We started out our conversation on how this book came to be.



See below for a transcript of this conversation:

Rachael:    I don't want to go way back into history, but the last five or six years, most states in the 40s, I think it's 46 out of the 50, rewrote their teacher evaluation policies almost completely. So we have this new wave of new generation policies and teachers all over the country over the last few years have been piloting them or getting into them for the second, third, fourth year, and it raises a lot of questions. They are higher stakes than they've ever been. They're happening for every teacher, every year, which is a new thing. People are using measurement tools for evaluating teaching that they've never used before, and we don't know a lot about how they work and how they work to support teachers, or how they work to identify teachers that are doing a great job or an okay job or doing a job that means they need support. 
    So, there are a lot of questions that are instructional questions, not just policy questions about what evaluation means for what actually happens in classrooms. What potential it maybe has or doesn't have to improve the quality of classroom interactions. Which I think is the stated goal of having an evaluation policy at all, but it's not always immediately obvious how the policy itself winds its way into what teachers and students actually do together in the classroom. 
    So, we both have this background in literacy and still work a lot with literacy teachers in different grade levels. And so we were doing a lot of thinking about how the new policies impact what happens in classrooms and what teachers are thinking and talking about. And then just informally in conversations with teachers it's what is on their minds a lot of the time. Especially at the beginning of the year and the end of the year. So, thinking about how they're going to be rated and what the ratings will mean for them as professionals and what they need to do to get different ratings. And also … I'll turn it over to you … Sarah's work with administrators, it's not always easy to make the evaluation happen and happen in an accurate and a fair way. So, teachers are worried about it, but I think probably almost equally administrators are worried about it.

Sarah: Yeah, I think there are two other pieces. I think that one, we started noticing in informal conversations with teachers that while they were perhaps had increases in stress and were experiencing kind of additional work related to evaluation, particularly at the beginning and the end of the year, they didn't necessarily always see or have access to the big picture ideas and policy messages and frameworks that were being used by policy makers with regard to evaluation.
    So another purpose was to open up that black box, or open up, demystify some of the definitions and terms and ideas that were behind evaluation. And then I think the other piece that we noticed in our work with literacy educators as well as leaders and in interacting wit...