The Questionnaire Strategy for Teacher Evaluation

The questionnaire is an effective tool for evaluating teacher’s performance. When teachers understand what students expect of them, they can better prepare lesson plans and projects that will meet the needs of every student. Not only will this method help discover the expectations of students, but it will establish a evaluation system that will uncover the areas of ineffectiveness in teacher performance and execution.

The questionnaire should be a series of questions designed to pinpoint the weak areas in a teacher’s performance in order to eliminate those weaknesses. The questions should be a result of a collaborate

effort based on the perspectives of high achieving students, teachers and administration. The questions should target such areas as passion, presentation, competence in subject knowledge, assessment style, quality and quantity of homework, and student/teacher engagement.

Passion

Before a teacher can achieve mastery in any area, he or she must have a passion for teaching as well as a great desire for seeing her students excel. Teachers must be so excited about changing the lives of their students that even the most disruptive students cannot destroy their joy and expectation for excellence.

Presentation

Boring and uncreative lesson plans and presentations cannot capture and keep the focus of today’s students. Teachers must take advantage of all the tools in their arsenal, including computers, videos, virtual reality technology, smart boards, creative projects, (indoors and outdoors), field trips as well as home projects requiring parental involvement.

Competence

One of the purposes of the questionnaire is to eradicate any incompetence discovered in teacher knowledge, performance and execution. An incompetent teacher cannot provide a quality education that will inspire students toward high achievement.
Teachers must know how to assess students in order to find out the areas of knowledge in which students are struggling. Who would know this better than the student?

Quality and quality of independent work

This includes seatwork and homework. Teachers must provide work that will challenge students to think and perform beyond what they would normally do. This work doesn’t have to be sheet work only. It can involve collaborative roll play, schemes, student presentations and group projects. Implementing variety is highly creative and exciting.

Student/teacher engagement

Teachers should be able to positively connect with students and inspire them to appreciate information and learning. The classroom should be a place where students love to come and discover new worlds of knowledge and experience. Every student should know that their teacher really cares about the quality of their education and is willing to go the extra mile at any time, if need be.

Designing a questionnaire that targets these areas will help accelerate a classroom teacher’s growth toward greatness. Questionnaires should be given at least three times a year: At the end of the first month of the first semester and last semester, and at the end of the school year. In this way, teachers will be able to measure their performance and growth.

Benefits of Allowing Teacher Assessments

Allowing students to grade teachers will result in several benefits for teachers, including improved performance, quality and productivity. But teachers must be willing to drop their guards and let students help them to achieve excellence in their profession. Many teachers may resist this highly effective strategy out of fear or lack of trust in student judgment.

However, because the questionnaire is a tool designed by a panel of students, teachers and administrators, the questions should be fair and accurate. In addition, the results of the assessment will not result in job loss. It is designed to promote teacher competence.

Teachers who desire to participate must let go of fear and trust the process. Teachers who submit to this process will gain substantial knowledge regarding their teaching effectiveness and will be able to master weaknesses within their classroom performance. Such teachers will be more contagious when it comes to preparing students for greatness in an increasingly complex world.

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Once a teacher Adapts and masters a personal educational philosophy, she must not waver in her perspective or become uncertain by early mistakes and failures. She must constantly refine and perfect her ideas and craft until it becomes an inner law. Greatness in teaching demands that we don’t blindly follow the leader but that we beat our own path to the promise land.

The trouble encountered by many new teachers in their first year is the difficulty of applying all the accumulated theories leant in college. They haven’t had the chance to discover what works and what doesn’t work in the modern classroom. Today’s classroom often defies the theories and formulas regarding classroom management and lesson designs that may have achieved success in the past. Each classroom is different. It has its own character and atmosphere. What works in once classroom will often fail in another?

Those teachers who have created their own, unwavering teaching philosophy possess the competence to take control of any classroom environment. They have confidence in the effectiveness of their ideology, no matter how unorthodox these ideas may appear to others.

Principles Needed to Develop an Unwavering Teaching Philosophy

Concentration

Maintaining a dynamic teaching philosophy requires extreme focus and concentration in today’s modern classroom. Many entities will challenge your ideas and approaches. They will attempt to redirect you into more traditional teaching routines. Before I won the teacher of the year award in 1998, I received many complaints about my teaching methods. I heard many emotionally unsettling things spoken behind my back.

However, I was confident in my teaching style and stood steadfast against the pressure. In the end, many of my peers were shocked at the rate my students had excelled. Parent testimonies were off the chart, so to speak. Mental toughness is concentration at its best.

Unafraid of negative consequences

Maintaining an unwavering teaching philosophy means that you are willing to endure administrative discipline or even job dismissal. Greatness sometimes comes at a heavy price. Some of the greatest teachers have moved forward against the grain and defied the odds. But although their ideology was rejected in the beginning, their message became a foundation to build upon for future generations.

Unquenchable Passion

A teacher with unquenchable passion for their teaching philosophy can endure all kinds of harassment on the job. They are so excited and involved in seeing their student excel academically that backbiting and objections from peers are overshadowed. For once, when I taught at a local school in Wisconsin I was so eager for the next day to arrive that I could hardly sleep at night. The next morning, even though I sensed the whispering and often got the cold shoulder from many of my peers, I was always ready to energize my students with a host of creative and innovative presentations.

Gaining Respect for your Philosophy.

Observation of highly exceptional people who have command of their personal philosophy is a fantastic way of gaining more respect for your own approach. Go to speaking presentations and watch how dynamic speakers lay out their ideas. The topic doesn’t have to involve education.

Your aim is to study different approaches to teaching people and adapting those processes to the education field and implementing them in the classroom. This is how you go about establishing your own personal teaching philosophy.

Being Different Pays Off

The importance of developing your own style of teaching cannot be stressed enough. If you want to become a dynamic teacher and separate yourself from the norm, you cannot do what everybody else is doing. Closing the achievement gap will require teachers who can come into a classroom and command it using ideas that have not been taught in the traditional education classes.

Once you are comfortable with your brand of teaching, you will have the opportunity to empower and equip student s with superior learning capacities. I often had groups of first graders performing at a third grade level. When the word spread regarding this outstanding accomplishment, new parents with first graders targeted my class with great honor and delight.

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