Sharing and Promoting Ideas

Today's prompt from Te@chThought: "Discuss one “observation” area that you would like to improve on for your teacher evaluation."

Our school currently uses the McREL evaluation instrument which rates each standard on a 1-4 scale: developing, proficient, accomplished, and distinguished. I didn't really have one glaringly weak area on my evaluations last year, but I did notice that there were a handful of standards where I was rated accomplished that had a common thread. I noticed I could improve a lot of areas by focusing on sharing. A lot of the standards were things I felt I did really well, some of them I thought I excelled at, but I wasn't getting the highest rating possible. After looking over the rubric, I agreed with my evaluation 100%. I was doing really great in some areas, but I was keeping my methods to myself. If we want to make real change, we have to look beyond our classroom. I see between 80 and 120 students in my math classes each year, depending on my courses and class sizes. Our school graduated about 460 students last year, meaning there are more than 1800 at the secondary level. If I do something well and my students benefit from it, why shouldn't I promote that to my colleagues so their students can benefit too. Even if someone wanted to look at this from a selfish standpoint, sharing an idea will benefit that person too. When someone else takes your idea and modifies it and improves upon it, now you will have a better version of your original to use with your students.

I want to spend time this year sharing my successes with not only the people in the math department, but in other departments if I feel it would work for them. Not only do I want to share, but I want to steal their ideas too. I would love to see our department meeting go from boring laundry lists of things to do and being talked at to either doing or watching someone else do a great lesson or mini-lesson that worked for the students. If this happened, everyone in our department could share and steal and all the kids would benefit.

#sharing #stealing