Discover how Common Core driven VAM method of teacher ranking that sometimes leads to teachers being yanked hard from their desired profession is nothing but a lottery, a crap shoot, that has nothing to do with teaching and/or learning.
In 2013-14, I was rated as a “highly effective” teacher.
The rating was based upon two classroom observations by one of our school administrators, an in-house semester “exam” (the quotes around the word exam are meant to convey a shoddy, last-minute delivery of an exam that if it were an assignment for a course I taught, it would surely have failed for its obviousness as an undisguised effort to “turn in something, anything”), and a more formal exam known as an End-of-Course (EOC) exam administered three weeks prior to the actual end of the course.
The “placing of my bet” was done via Student Learning Targets (SLT) focused on the outcomes of the in-house exam and the EOC. SLT isn’t value-added modeling (VAM), but it is still gambling.
My formal observation is the component over which I have the most control. The school administrator who observed me appreciated that I…
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 