This is the end…

It seems weird that this is the last post I’ll do for this class.  The summer classes seemed to move by so slowly, and yet there was the same amount of work packed into less time.  However, with this class, and it going all semester, I feel a finality with this post.  I struggled quite a bit in this class.  I wasn’t ever sure of what I was supposed to be doing or how I was supposed to be doing it.  But the professor helped immensely every time I had a question.  And one fellow classmate (who shall remain nameless but she knows who she is I’m sure) has helped more than I could have ever imagined possible.  I’m truly enjoying what I’ve been learning in these last three classes.  That having been said, I posted what I hope to be my final paper today.  It was a lot of work – especially since I had to keep re-doing it!  Hopefully now I have it right and it’s done.  What I like the most about the set-up of these classes is the feedback.  Not just from the professor, but the students as well.  I find that now it’s fun for me to “put myself out there for the whole world to see.”  Before I found that idea frightening.  However, after doing it for three classes now, and particularly with this class, I have found how helpful it can be.  And now I’m not afraid to do it at all!  This has been a wonderful class and I truly enjoyed working with everyone.  See you again in the spring!

The end is near

Okay, so I’m dealing mostly with getting the paper together this week.  I thought it was coming along well until I posted the first part of it, only to find that it wasn’t coming along so well after all.  But hey, that’s been my experience with this class from the beginning, so it’s only fitting that it should reoccur on the final project. 

I’m working to get the paper done by Tuesday so I can post it and get as much feedback as possible from my peers.  It’s so valuable for me to get that feedback.  My Power Point needs a little work to be complete as well – but I’m not changing it until I get the paper done.  I worked it around the way my paper started – and as previously discussed – that was wrong.  So I’ll just wait until I get the paper done and tidy up the Power Point. 

Okay, so here are my goals – let’s see how well I can stick to them.  My first goal is to have the paper done by Tuesday and posted in the final week so others can look at it.  My second goal is to have the Power Point done by Friday and posted.  I’m usually pretty good at working towards my goals… I hope I can get these two done!

AI in all its glory

The two case studies that I reviewed this week really drove home what fantastic things can come from incorporating AI into evaluation tools.  Each company, upon implementing an AI evaluation, had much more success with the evaluation.  The employees felt as if they had a voice, as if someone was listening to them and what they had to say mattered.  And because they were using an AI evaluation, they were being asked to reflect upon positive experiences.  People came out of the evaluation feeling refreshed, ready to implement changes, willing to work towards a better future.  From my own experience with teacher meetings, I can tell you that is hardly ever the case.  We spend so much time in teacher meetings focusing on the negative; which kids aren’t going to make AYP, the lack of money we have to fund the programs we want, the amount of time being asked of us without any pay compensation, how bad the kids are compared to 20 years ago… you get the point.  I often leave teacher meetings feeling kicked down and resentful.  It’s hard to get excited about the future when you feel dejected in the present.  I believe that if we could use AI in our teacher meetings we might be more successful in between them.  I equate it to going to a conference.  When you get out of a conference – if it’s a good one where you participated and felt like you could use some of the material – you feel excited about taking what you learned and incorporating it into your own classroom.  However, I have found several times that when I get back I hit a wall of resistance to each new idea, due to money issues, or lack of technology, or beliefs among other teachers in the department.  It’s like having the wind sucked out of me.  I feel that’s what AI avoids.  It lets us all focus on the positives rather than the negatives.

I still have to complete the power point for my final project.  While it’s coming along nicely, I have found in this course in particular, that constant review and updating is needed to make it what I want it to be.  I think I could have started this hypothetical evaluation 10 years ago and still find a need to review and edit it as I go.  However, I can tell you that it is about 100 times better than it was when I first started.  And I have noticed that my questions, both in my interview and in my survey, have changed dramatically.  My intial “what do I want answered” questions have changed as well.  It’s funny how things can change so much – my inital evaluation tool was rather negative – while I wanted it to be positive.  Now I know how to make that happen.

Oh What a Feeling

So I really thought that writing a survey was going to be way easier than writing the interview questions.  But, as this class and program have done several times to me, I was completely wrong!  Everyone takes surveys without much thought as to how hard it is to write them, but it really is!  Trying to find the right wording, to avoid being biased, to clearly express what you mean by the questions; it’s all really difficult!  After having talked with Pam, I realized that I had written my survey as if everyone in the district felt as I do and would know what I meant – and therefore what I was asking for – in my questions.  That is not the case.  It helped to have someone to bounce ideas off of and give me suggestions as to how to make things clearer.  Everyday, it seems, I enjoy this set up more and more.  And I’m so thankful that this group connect and sharing layout is how these classes are run.  Now I sit here and try and think of ways to incorporate this into my own classroom because I have had so much success with it!  As Pam and I discussed tonight – one set of eyes is good.  Two sets of eyes are better.  Thirty sets of eyes rocks!!  Thanks, guys!

Interviewing the Great

This week I was paired with Pam to conduct our interviews.  Setting up for the interview, as well as going in to it, I was a bit baffled as to what the expectations were.  Her evaluation is over the technology used in her district and how to improve it.  However, I’m not a member of her district.  What I don’t know is if I’m supposed to answer the interview questions as if I were a teacher in her district or not.  I suppose – as I’m writing this about 13 minutes before we’re about to meet for those interviews – I’ll find out in the interview itself.

Oh what a wonderful experience I just had!  I just completed the interview with Pam and it was incredible.  It really made the class and the evaluation final project make sense.  What helped was seeing how focusing on the positives really does change an evaluation.  After being interviewed by Pam and relating the positive stories about technology in my own personal situations, I was pumped up for her school district to begin furthering its technology curriculum.  And the interview caused me to finally figure out that in my own evaluation for new teachers, I need to focus on the positives.  That’s what we’re looking for here, folks.  And now I am a believer that it works.  I feel so much better about what I’m doing in this class because of this interview it’s amazing.  I think Professor Bullock put me with Pam because she knew that Pam would be able to help me – someone who has very much been struggling with this course since it’s debut – and it worked!! 

Alright, so for now I leave this blog.  I am going to sit in a hot bath of Vick Vaporub and try to get rid of my flu before the weekend.

Evaluation Questions

The further I venture into this New Teacher Evaluation, the more sense it is making to me.  This week I came up with evaluation questions as part of the assignment.  As I was coming up with these questions, all the readings we’ve done about Appreciative Inquiry came to mind.  I included a reflective paper and a post-observation communication requirement to my evaluation to make the new teacher feel more a part of the evaluation. 

When I thought about what questions to include in my evaluation, I tried to imagine what I, as an evaluator, would need to know in order to gauge the progress of the new teacher.  While some of the questions were easy to ask, i.e. is the new teacher successful in maintaining classroom management, others took a bit more soul-searching to figure out how to put them in to words.  I chose also to include a “What is the new teacher doing well?” question to further use AI and point out the postives.  The more I’ve been thinking about an evaluation, the more I have begun to see the one we use now as a negative tool.  I realize that we are intimidated by an evaluation not because of what we can learn from it, but because we’re afraid of what we’re doing wrong.  Incorporating AI and focusing on the positives as well as the negatives will help change the general tone of the evaluation.

I chose to use the questions I did because I feel that the answers to those questions will truly prove the merit of the new teacher.  The questions were chosen as a checkpoint of issues that need to be assessed as well as the main points that the new teacher should be completing.  More importantly, I chose not to include some questions that are found in our normal teacher evaluation tool because I feel that they are geared too much towards the veteran teacher.  For instance, I hate the community/outside school requirement in our current tool.  The first year of teaching is hard enough without having to take on a sport, club, activity, or sponsorship – so therefore I don’t think it should hold bearing on an evaluation; it shouldn’t be something that can be marked negatively against new teachers. 

I just finished reading the responses to my evaluation questions, and I am currently heading back to update it and add some more concise timelines for each evaluation to be done.  I can finally see this thing coming together – which is the best feeling I’ve had so far in this class!

Using AI in Evaluations

As I read this week’s assignment and wrote my response to how including AI helped various evaluations, I have a greater appreciation of what AI can do.  It opens communication between the evaluation team and its stakeholders, it allows everyone to be as involved as they can be, and it fosters a desire to use the findings of an evaluation to improve the program as a whole.  I feel that for my final project, creating a new-teacher evaluation, incorporating AI principles into the evaluation itself would be beneficial for the new teacher.  We do this on our evaluation now, using a post-evaluation meeting to discuss the evaluation, but it needs to be more.  We need to have an area where we document what the teacher is doing well and how to improve on those things as well as what still needs to be improved.  After having read more about AI, I believe that a bi-annual evaluation of a new teacher might not be enough.  Teaching is very much a daily reflective process.  As such, it needs to be evaluated like that.  I’m thinking of maybe including a part on my evaluation tool for a weekly meeting among other teachers to discuss what is and isn’t working in their own classrooms so that others can benefit from this knowledge.

Writing an Evaluation Plan

I have to say that writing an evaluation plan is proving to be harder than I first imagined.  It seems that there are so many different facets to a good evaluation.  You have to be fair, unbiased, invested, sometimes knowledgeable, sometimes not, and able to perform the evaluation.  It’s more frustrating than enlightening at times. 

I’ll give you an example.  I wrote a rough draft of a new teacher evaluation.  It took me over three hours to put down in words what I had pictured as the evaluation I would use.  Then I read the feedback from my peers and I realize that this fantastic plan I had thought of had several major flaws.  It’s hard trying to make all these various parts come together without forgetting one here and there.

I’m still not 100% sure what the actual hypothetical (that’s a bit oxy-moronish, don’t you think?!) is supposed to look like.  I keep doing all the reading and trying to make sense of it, but it’s just not coming very quickly.  I’m not a very good “outside-the-box” thinker.  If you were to give me an evaluation and ask me to assess it using the readings we’ve done for this class, I could do that.  But trying to create my own evaluation from just reading what makes up a good, fair evaluation is like asking me to part the seas.  I’m not even really good at interpreting comics, let alone interpreting scholarly texts for the purpose of creating my own based on the requirements set forth by others. 

Frustration is a good word to use right now.  All the principles, and standards, and types of evaluations, and types of evaluators, etc, is all too overwhelming at this moment.  However, I keep plugging through it, hoping and wating desperately for the time when that proverbial lightbulb will kick on and it will suddenly all make sense.

The Use of Human Subjects

This week, we read about the use of human subjects for research.  I was amazed at how many rules apply when using human subjects.  I was also shocked to learn how often human subjects have been abused in history when used for research.  In the Belmont Report, for example, it states that, “During the Nuremberg War Crime Trials, the Nuremberg code was drafted as a set of standards for judging physicians and scientists who had conducted biomedical experiements on concentration camp prisoners.”  It reminds me of everything we’re hearing about Guantanamo Bay.  I have heard and read frightening accounts of the torture that’s being done to prisoners there just to find out if they know anything.  While I realize that this is slightly different than using human subjects for, let’s say, medical research – I believe it’s a fine line.  The Belmont Report summed up my feelings best in saying, “The distinction between research and practice is blurred partly because both often occur together…”.  It is a very fine line in my opinion.

The idea of using human subjects should be lead by the Basic Ethical Principles.  Those who are having the research done on them need to be someone of sound mind and body, capable of making conscience decisions about what they are subjecting themselves to.  When I was in college, I took an Educational Psychology class, in which we discussed the treatment of mentally handicapped or disabled persons in the late 1960s.  Without having those notes right around me – as it has been 7 years since I was in that class – I remember horror stories about doctors locking up mentally hanidcapped people in insane asylums because they didn’t know what else to do with them.  This is seen again in the Belmont Report, “during the 19th and 20th centuries the burdens of serving as research subjects fell larely upon poor ward patients, while the benefits of improved medical care flowed primarily to private patients.”  It makes me wonder if their ethical principles were in mind when tests were run on them to figure out what was the best course of action to treat them.  Also, in a country where you have to prove medical insurance in order to receive the proper treatment from most places, who truly fair is our use of human subjects in research?

I have to wonder where the “for the good of the cause” and the “spare the rod” line cross.  Reading the various examples given about “research” conducted on prisoners almost flattened me.  The other time this line blurred for me was when the Belmont Report talks about justifying research using children.  I might be a little bit biased in what I’m about to say – for reasons I’ll explain in a moment – but the idea of research being conducted on children scares the heck out of me.  My niece, who turned 6 months on August 25, goes in on Monday, the 15th, to have an artery removed.  She was born 3 1/2 weeks premature, and because of this one of her arteries is wrapping around her trachea and choking her to death.  Unlike everything else that is wrong with her as a result of being a premie, this is not something she will grow out of.  While I’m glad that there have been other children who have suffered from this problem in the past so that the doctor knows exactly what he’s doing, I have a hard time imagining that I would be okay with this procedure if it was still in the “experiemental” phase.  I hold in the highest regard those who have come before my niece and allowed for the research to pave the way for her; but I don’t know if I would be willing to see this surgery done if it was to be performed on her as a test.  I realize this is a little bit paradoxical – I’m glad others have paved the way but I don’t agree in “testing” children – but I can’t seem to put in to words exactly what it is that I mean.  I wish there was some other way to test procedures, I guess. 

So, after a couple of long rants, I’m pretty sure I’ve just confused myself and you, the reader, even more.  I find that I have the hardest time putting what I want to say into the right words.  Maybe I should conduct research on myself as a human subject trying to find the best words!

All About Me!

My name is Kelly Ferdinand and I am currently teaching French at Oakwood High School in Fithian, Illinois.  I am in my 5th year teaching, my third at Oakwood.  I am in the process of getting my Master’s Degree in Curriculum, Technology and Educational Reform via the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  I have enjoyed all I have learned so far through this program and I am using one of the major projects I have already created in class.  I plan on using the other major project when I get to my Paris Unit in November.  From this class, I hope to gain insight as to different ways to evaluate and assess assignements and projects as well as ways to complete this task using technology.  I am already impressed with how much easier my life is now that I have begun implementing technology into my curriculum.  Once I am done with this course, I plan on taking what I have learned and pitching the idea of an evaluation workshop for the teachers and administrators at my school.  I am on a committee to revamp the Teacher’s Evaluation Tool for my district; I hope to learn several new ideas to bring in to this updated evaluation tool.  I look forward to working with all of you again!