Mrs. Christensen's Teaching Blog

My husband, Brad (a high school teacher) has worked at various international schools and currently works for a US public school in Sicily (Department of Defense Education Activity School), which I will call School A. I interviewed Brad about how teachers are evaluated at school A and the international school he worked at in Hong Kong (School B). At School A the principal shows up at random to do observations and there is no pre or post observation meetings. The principal doesn’t take notes and doesn’t give any feedback. At the end of the year she rates all the teachers as “satisfactory” .  She will arbitrarily state that some teachers aren’t “doing what they are supposed to be doing” but what they are “supposed to be doing” has never been outlined. My husband heard from another teacher that as long as you write your standards on the board that is all the principal is looking for. Teacher observation at School B was much like the video “The Formal Observation” outlined in the Teach

“Educators tend to be against high stakes testing…Students may worry much about passing their exams”  (Edridge, p. 2, 5), rings true in my ears. As I prepare for my PRAXIS, a step towards my teaching license,  my life has become totally absorbed with high stakes testing. The expense, the worry, the time consuming nature of studying for multiple choice general knowledge tests, has given me a empathy for students around the world who are being subjected to high stakes testing. Academic research has shown that high stakes testing is not the best measure of student achievement  or ability(Edridge, 2001). However, these types of assessments prevail as they are easy to administer and gather tidy scores that quickly assess if a student is a success of failure. At its core high stakes testing aims to help keep teachers, students and school districts accountable and improve achievement (Huang, Han and Schnapp, 2012).  In this blog post I will be comparing two schools; Department of Defens