Principals will spend an increasing amount of time out of their offices and in classrooms because of a new statewide teacher-evaluation system they will begin using next school year.
At Southwest Junior High School in Springdale, Principal Brice Wagner oversees the daily activities of 976 eighth- and ninth-graders, 68 teachers and other certified educators and roughly 35 staff members who support the day-to-day operations at the Springdale campus.
“It’s like running a city,” he said. “There are towns in Arkansas that have fewer people than this school does.”
He spends as much time as he can visiting classrooms, he said.
The principal’s role hasshifted from primarily handling student discipline and overseeing a school’s operation toward greater involvement in the academic direction of a school, said Paul Hewitt, an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. The new teacher evaluation system will continue to push principals in that direction.
“If you’re a principal in Russellville, you’re going to be looking for the same things in instruction as they are in Springdale,” said Hewitt who had a career in public education in California before joining the university six years ago.
Principals run a multimillion dollar operation with dozens of employees, Hewitt said. Teachers depend on principals to ensure that a campus is efficient, organizedand structured.
Responsibility for instruction has always been part of the job, but instructional leadership has become a more important part of the job within the past 15 years, he said.
“Now the main drive is the principal has to be the instructional leader,” Hewitt said.
STATEWIDE BY ’14
School administrators began extensive training in the new evaluation system in January , said Marcia Sanders, assistant director of the Northwest Arkansas Education Service Cooperative. The training is intended to ensure that teachers receive a fair evaluation that would stand if a teacher sued, Sanders said.
All school districts in Arkansas will begin using thenew evaluation system in a statewide pilot in the 2013-14 school year, with the full implementation scheduled for the following year, Sanders said.
The new Teacher Excellence and Support System was created by Act 1209 of 2011. The system is based on the work of Charlotte Danielson, who specializes in the design of teacher-evaluation systems. She advises state education departments in the United States and overseas.
Principals will conduct indepth evaluations annually for teachers with fewer than three years of experience or who are struggling, Sanders said. The bulk of a campus’s teachers will receive a thorough evaluation every three years.
“The goal is that the principal be the true instructionalleader of the building, not just a manager,” Sanders said.
Many districts in Northwest Arkansas already are familiar with Danielson’s Framework for Teaching, which divides the 22 responsibilities of teachers into four sections for the evaluation.
Principals will rate teachers on their classroom environment and instruction during classroom observations, Sanders said. The principal and teacher will discuss her knowledge of content and resources and her professional responsibilities during oneon-one meetings.
“This is so much more reflective,” she said.
When Sanders was in her first year of teaching 25 yearsago, she remembers a principal observing her teaching for about 15 minutes in October of her first year, she said. The principal filled out an evaluation form and decreed her a master teacher.
“I knew I was in no way, shape or form a master teacher,” Sanders said. “That gave me no information.”PRINCIPAL AS COACH
Principals across the state are at varying stages of shifting to the new teacher evaluation system, said Claire Lesieur, principal of Eureka Springs Elementary School. Lesieur and her staff have spent the past two years preparing for the change.
“It’s going to be more focused and more conversation,” Lesieur said. “I see myself coming more into a coaching role and helpingteachers set goals.”
She has spent time with teachers reviewing each of the 22 skills and abilities and setting goals, she said.
Lesieur already spends time in classrooms doing quick classroom observations, but the new evaluation system will require her to block off longer periods of time for more in-depth observations, she said. She anticipates having to be out of her office more often to focus on supporting teachers. She will have to develop other strategies for issues related to running the building and maintenance.
“We’re going to have to find a balance,” she said.
DISTRICT’S DECISION
State regulations have required school districts to conduct annual teacher evaluations, but districts could decide how to evaluate teachers, said Hartzell Jones, deputy superintendent for personnel for Springdale. Springdale adopted a comprehensive evaluation system in 1996.
Teachers new to the district have been subject to a “clinical” evaluation that is similar to the new teacher-evaluation system, Jones said. The current clinical evaluations include two formal observations and an unannounced visit to the classroom.
Wagner typically will stay for an entire class period when observing a teacher. He pays attention to how a teacher begins the class period and introduces the objective for the day. He watches for established classroom routines. He stays through the end to see that a teacher doesn’t cutinstruction short, wasting minutes at the end of a class period.
Teachers will ask him to monitor certain activities more closely, such as their transitions from one activity to another or for clarity in giving instructions, he said.
“The idea is the observation is nothing you’re doing to penalize or be punitive,” he said. “All of the evaluations are to improve the teacher.”
Since training on the new evaluation system, Wagner has a greater awareness of how a teacher’s actions and student responses would be rated under Danielson’s framework, he said.
“It will help fine-tune their teaching,” he said. “It will be a road map to share with the teachers how you can get to a higher level of instruction.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 15 on 04/21/2013