Teacher Performance Assessment

Yesterday was the big orientation meeting for my student teaching experience, which starts next week. We were introduced to the latest education flavor-of-the-month, the Teacher Performance Assessment project. This will involve submitting incredibly detailed lesson plans and producing about 15 minutes of video of me teaching the plans, as well as student work, my feedback and reflections on the entire process.

I've been fascinated by the subject of teacher evaluation since my first semester as a post-baccalaureate education major, and I heartily approve of a more comprehensive method than the geeky, tooth-and-claw capitalistic and ultimately unfair "value-added" calculus. My reservations are as follows:

• The pilot program is being run by Pearson, a for-profit textbook company that has made a decidedly inferior impression on me after three semesters of using its education software and textbooks; and
• Inevitably, teachers who are good at making interesting videos will get higher scores.

This second point is probably more relevant, given the current position of education "reform" as a political football. If personnel decisions like raises, hiring and even firing of teachers grow to be dependent on the TPA scores, we may see a cottage industry grow up of dynamic education filmmakers producing videos "guaranteed to get you at least a 3" out of a low score of 5.

This is, of course, not at all the idea. But I'm all for the principle of having a variety of sources for teacher evaluation, so I'm going to focus this semester's blog entries not so much on my student teaching experiences per se as on my preparations for, and experiences with, the TPA.