Last week the Superintendent of Schools stopped by for a visit. My principal contacted me by phone about three days before she was due to arrive to let me know that he would like to have her stop by my classroom to observe me teaching. Now, as we all know when company is coming over we make a big-to-do about preparing for their arrival. I am no different, so I spent hours searching through pictures that I have saved on my computer that I could publish. I also made sure that I planed extra well for the lessons that I would teach that day so that everything would run smoothly. And I worked hard to make the documentation of children’s work the number one priority for the next three days. Needless to say that the Superintendent was busy and never made it by my class while I was teaching, instead we arranged a meeting to discuss concerns about the curriculum that the teachers on our grade level had.So the question that I am going to pose is, “Why do we do that which children deserve when adults are present?” Please don’t get me wrong I do a good job of lesson planning, documenting work, and responding to children’s curiosity; but I normally do not do as good of a job as I did those three days. It is the same when you know you are being evaluated by an administrator, you step up your game and the children benefit. I will have to say that I am a little disappointed in my actions last week. I put the idea of impressing the Superintendent over that of impressing my children who I should be working for first in the classroom.
- How do we begin to value the child as the evaluator of our work, instead of the administration?
- What steps to we take to make sure that we do not loose touch with what children disserve?
1 comments:
Children do deserve our best every day but in reality our working lives have peaks and valleys. I'm not sure it's wrong to become more highly motivated and engaged as a teacher when you know there will be an adult observer. If you think about it there are probably some topics that inspire creativity in us more than others. These topics become well orchestrated learning experiences for children. Then there are the teachable moments. Those teachable moments are unscheduled and unscripted but no less valuable. Like us, children can't operate on an overdose of adrenelin long before we crash. Maybe observations should be more frequent. Perhaps we should expect an administrator to walk in our door once a month for an informal observation. Or maybe, just maybe, our students are bringing out the best in us whether we know it or not.
Kathy Shields, Teacher
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