Comments on: School’s Out for Summer

By: 2009: A Recap « A Patchwork Life: writing, teaching, learning more each day

2009: A Recap « A Patchwork Life: writing, teaching, learning more each day — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 20:30:10 +0000

[...] for Lucy’s class while seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. My summer kicked off with a great workshop, and the first of many days at the pool. I was thinking a lot about work and greener [...]

By: jackie

jackie — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:55:53 +0000

We have observations by peer, dept chair, and administrator, and we get to choose the peer. The eval team meets once at the beginning of the process, once in he middle, and once at the end. We go through the eval process for each of the three years, and then I think periodically after that. We also get assigned a mentor for our first year, which is kind of a looser process. My official mentor has been incredibly helpful to me, and I served as a mentor this past year too. We enter all the results on a web application we’ve developed but are thinking about ways to make it viable in OneNote now as well.

Choosing your own process sounds interesting, like you could focus on the aspect of your teaching that you feel you most need feedback on. Like for me, I think I’m aware of my strengths and am working on my weaknesses, but I *love* collaboration, so a peer review group would be really fun for me. Next year I’m serving on the eval team for a math teacher, and am really interested in seeing how I can gain from that myself. But I know some really look forward to the classroom observations, because they feel they would like a different perspective on how they present themselves in the classroom, and so that can be really helpful. Have you talked to other teachers at your school about what they’ve done? I’d be really curious to see.

By: What Now?

What Now? — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:55:16 +0000

I also have a third-year review coming up next year, and apparently the review can be a different sort of affair in that year at my school. (The first two years it’s a fairly standard: observations by department chair, an administrator, and a peer.) Folks do lesson plan workshops, work in peer review groups, etc., and apparently I can propose any sort of review that I think would be helpful. I’m kind of at a loss about what to propose, I’ll admit! So I’d love to hear more about what peer review looks like at your school; I’m eager for ideas.