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.
