Maiah Islam ’21
Photo Courtesy of Episcopal Academy
This year EA is implementing a new evaluation process that will assess faculty and administrators to help them grow. “We [the administrators] spent all of last year talking about what this process should look like,” says Head of Upper School Michael Letts. It is “based more on the idea to help people find and achieve goals and get better everyday,” Letts continues.
Process includes specific feedback. An evaluation form asks whether EA’s teachers “Maintain an active online presence as required by each division” or whether they “welcome diverse attitudes and points of view from people within and beyond the community.” These questions fall under three major categories for assessment: teaching, community values, and core responsibilities. In this way, the process is more centralized and concrete.
The evaluation process consists of a formal observation and a self-evaluation. The self-evaluation includes various categories such as how the teacher “works to incorporate the stripes into the curriculum” and supports students outside the classroom. Letts elaborates on what happens from there, “You then evaluate yourself as a teacher and identify if you think this is an area of strength or one of growth, where you either have goals to get better or you think you can do more.” Growth is a key factor is this process, and Letts hopes the evaluations will facilitate communication between department heads and their teachers. Science Chair Grace Limaye says that she hopes to be “knowledgeable about each approach” and be “able to support teachers in areas they think they need to grow in.” She continues, “Ultimately, I don’t want to see myself as an evaluator, I want to see myself as more of an instructional coach.”
So far since the school year has just passed mid-semester, the evaluation process has not yet come into full effect, but feedback has already occurred. Physics teacher Dan Baxter comments, “The feedback I’ve had so far has been encouraging and constructive.” Limaye explains, “I am going to wait after teachers are done writing comments to ask them to fill out the form. I wanted to give them time to get used to their classes, assess and give some feedback to their kids, and then I want them to be able to take the time to reflect on themselves.”
Folio, the program with which students previously evaluated teachers at the end of a course, is still going to be used, but it will soon be replaced. Letts explains, “I get that input in the spring and then I go into summer. It’s not that I forget about it but I would love to have been able to get the feedback and then make adjustments immediately.”
Student feedback, Letts feels, “was some of the best feedback I would receive.” He thinks that students have been “extremely thoughtful and approached it with the appropriate responsibility.”
Even though it is still being worked out, Letts says the overarching goal of the evaluation process is “to have a system in place to help teachers get better, to make sure we’re all doing the things we need to be doing as educators, staff, and administrators. The focus of this is not on punishment but growth.”