Coming To Terms With The Standards

     I had a hard time getting started on this class (EPEL 8970).  When I saw that the assignments were summaries of standards, I nearly gagged.

     At this point, I’ve been doing this for long enough that I’ve been through several revisions of the standards for my subject and of the general evaluation rubric for teachers.  I’ve always had a hard time stomaching these things.  The standards are generally a very convoluted way to state the obvious. 

     When the TKES standards came out, I looked them over, got a headache, put them in a drawer, and virtually never thought about them again.  With that approach to the standards, I’ve been rated exemplary every year since they came out with a couple of those years being given a perfect score.  With all the emphasis on standards in our profession, how does this make any sense!?  It’s because the standards state the obvious.  If I’m doing a good job as a teacher, I’m meeting those standards.  Why should I have to get a headache decoding them to know this?

     When I started on the first assignment of summarizing the LKES standards, I had to fight back the overwhelming urge to write “Do Your Job” on the paper, and then just turn it in – sometimes my inner punk-rock teenager still fights to come out.  Upon forced reflection, though (after all, I still had to do this assignment), I decided that I could be alright with working through the obvious.  My first step was to take the convoluted standard language and put it in plain English:  Does your school have good teaching?  Is your school well disciplined?  Are you basing decisions on data?  How well do you manage your budget?  Do you hire and retain good staff?  Do you give good feedback to your staff and help them improve?  Are you still learning and contributing to the profession?  Do you communicate well with stakeholders?

     After I had plain English, I’ve been able to interact with these questions by imagining what the answers to these questions look like in day to day practice.  Taking this approach into my GELS interviews has made the conversations very productive and informative as I’ve been able to get a look at what an administrator does on a day to day basis when they ‘do their job.’