The Piedmont Highlander

The Student News Site of Piedmont High School

The Piedmont Highlander

The Piedmont Highlander

Teachers develop new evaluation system

Starting this school year, there will be a new teacher evaluation system to advance student learning.

Three years ago, the school board, along with teachers and parents of Piedmont High, decided that the school needed a better evaluation system that looked at what teachers were doing to improve student learning. After this decision, the board hired a consultant, Carol Boyd, who created a team of teachers and administrators from different sites, including Piedmont elementary schools and the middle school, to create a completely new system of evaluations.

English teacher Dr. Marks, a participant on the new evaluation system committee, said that the new system is directly emphasized on each individual teacher setting a goal for the year and that goal has to be based on student learning. The evaluation is then based on if that teacher is accomplishing his or her goal.

“It is a constant process of reflection, sharing, learning and growing,” Marks said.

The value of the system is that it is more genuinely meaningful and that we are going to have more growth within the teachers, because everyone can get better,” Marks said.

One component that the system is based off of is the 360 degree model. This model is designed to obtain feedback from all different sources, including administrators, students, and parents. This will allow teachers who are being evaluated to obtain feedback from all different areas to promote better teaching and provide better learning for their students.

“We wanted a system that was about helping teachers enhance their teaching abilities and then furthering this knowledge onto other teachers. Teachers can now share better techniques with each other and together look at what each department and our different grade levels are doing as a whole,” Marks said.

Because this system has now been created to focus on the collaboration between different teachers, Hayden, an additional participant on the new evaluation system committee, said he believes that this will further student knowledge and promote better learning.

“The more we can learn from our colleagues, the better we are going to be as teachers. The better we are, the faster we can accomplish our ending goal for the new system, which is for the students to have the best educational experience they can possibly have at Piedmont,” Hayden said.

In order to have the best education possible, students, as well as parents, have been incorporated into this new system by having the ability to complete a survey about the performance of the teacher at Piedmont High.

Senior Will Strimling said that he believes that it is beneficial for the students and parents to have the ability to add their input on how the teacher is performing to enhance the idea of obtaining feedback from all different sources to promote better teaching.

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