The New York Times' March 4th's Sunday Review Section includes an opinion piece titled "Confesions of a 'Bad' Teachers" which relates to performance and evaluations in education. The gist of the article could be applicable to other fiels as well. After reading the piece, summarize it and state your opinion about the subject in the blog. Be ready to discuss the article and your views before your class for extra-credit points.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/confessions-of-a-bad-teacher.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Bad%20Teacher&st=cse
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The teacher in this article, feels that he is a good teacher but is portrayed as a "bad" teacher by his principal. He then starts to do everything his principal wants him to do in class because he is scared of losing his job when he should really be focusing on his students.Therefore I believe teachers should be able to run their class the way they want to instead of principals walking into their classrooms for 5 minutes and they see one student throwing a pencil and automatically give the teacher a "unsatisfactory" rating.
ReplyDeleteIn this article, William Johnson, a special education teacher, writes about his experiences with classroom evaluations and how they poorly represented the quality of his teaching.
ReplyDeleteJohnson once had a classroom evaluation in which an assistant principle came in to his classroom to assess the teachers’ ability to teach the students that he has. And as in every situation that has to go perfectly, a student acted up, as if trying to “test” the professor herself. This student began throwing a fit and even started tossing pencils across the room. Johnson proceeded to send the student to the ¬¬dean’s office due to her actions. Nonetheless, Johnson received a bad evaluation and when he asked why, the administrator said it was because he did not follow the discipline steps the right way.
I believe that it was unfair for Johnsons teaching skills to be automatically deemed “bad” because he was not able to follow disciplinary steps when a student was clearly acting out during an evaluation. A teachers’ ability to teach is not determined by the teachers’ ability to give a student a detention or not.
In this article Mr. Johnson was labeled to be the “The Bad Teacher”. Seems as if he was doing the best he could do with what he had. Giving this school the grade of “A” and Mr. Johnson to be separated and out casted as a bad teacher doesn’t make any sense.
ReplyDeleteIt’s always the persons that give the “Bad Teacher” label are the one’s who are inexperienced in this field. Needless to say, I don’t think they would be able to handle 5 minutes of being in the classroom with students let alone them being special needs students. Special needs to students require more attention that your ordinary student. Mr. Johnson did what was needed to be done and I do not see anything with sending the disruptive student to the office, that’s what the higher administration is there for. So if they felt that he needed to discipline the students himself it’s a little to much for him to have on his plate.