Evaluation and Methods of Teaching
Parents, policymakers and society in general are often concerned about the effectiveness of teaching methods. While educational specialists have conducted numerous studies on effective teaching methods, they have not developed fail-safe methods of evaluating educators. Still, there are some general areas that indicate teaching excellence.
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Instructional Delivery
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One area to evaluate educators is in instructional delivery. While educators might fulfill all of the state standards for education, they might not deliver information in a way that is engaging and varied. While engaging instructional methods are subjective, teachers can still be evaluated on their utilization of instructional techniques that take into consideration multiple learning styles. Educators should try to provide both auditory instruction and visual aids for students. For example, educators can always provide education orally while putting up a PowerPoint presentation that contains key points in the lecture and images that convey information that is difficult to convey orally. Educators should also try to educate students by having them actually perform tasks. For example, in addition to demonstrating to students how to do math problems, educators should have students practice doing these math problems themselves.
Teacher Grading
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Educators must find effective ways to assess student progress. Assessments help educators understand where students are in education, while testing and reviews focus on giving students grades that help determine when the students need to move on to the next grade level. Educators can use a broad range of methods. Students are often asked to answer questions on a written exam, write essays in which they argue a point while demonstrating an understanding of the class content and create presentations where students present information to the rest of the class. Educators also often ask students questions in the class to gauge content comprehension.
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Extra Instruction Time
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Students sometimes need extra class time to master certain subjects. Educators can be evaluated based on how much extra time they give students during class and outside of class. For example, writing instructors often give students conferencing time either before or after class where the instructor talks to the student about his or her paper. For educators to help students with their writing, the educators must understand the thought process of their students when developing their essays, which are not always available to the educator in the essay itself.
Student Academic Success
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When students succeed academically, this success can indicate that the educator is effectively teaching the students. Thus, administrators can evaluate educators based on academic success. However, academic success is sometimes difficult to quantify since students can learn skills from their educators that are not measurable. Policymakers often rely on standardized tests and require that educators prepare students for these tests to the extent where the students pass the standardized tests. This method of teacher evaluation is not always successful because test makers have had a difficult time designing tests that can accurately measure student learning. Some students who learned little in class can still score high on tests because of adept test taking skills, while the reverse can be true for other students. Very poorly designed tests can score students in a way that encourages them to write poorly. For example, some standardized writing tests are graded so quickly that students have to write essays in a formulaic way that may not confuse the test graders, leading to an A, but won't succeed in any realm outside of the test.
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References
- Photo Credit Teacher image by Vasiliy Koval from Fotolia.com
