Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation

An emphasis on team-building took center stage during a daylong training today where all of our principals and senior staff heard from Kim Marshall, author of “Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation.” While principals are generally resistant about leaving their schools for a full day, I believe everyone understood the great value contained in today’s session as we work as a district to strive for academic excellence.

The bulk of Kim Marshall’s workshop centered around meaningful, effective and efficient means of evaluating teachers. Discussions included points related to high performance expectations, trust building, meaningful feedback and support, continual improvement, time management, teacher involvement and effective supervision.

Today’s session was a vital resource and included several tools that principals can begin using immediately for vastly improving supervision and evaluation practices to foster teacher professional development district wide.

Kim emphasized four high yield strategies: Mini-observations, End-of-Year Rubric Evaluations, Team Interim Assessments and Team Curriculum Unit Planning. This work is consistent with changes in the Massachusetts Model System for Educator Evaluations, which helps us leverage the implementation locally with a profound impact on teaching and learning to improve student achievement.