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Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Marzano Madness

My state has revamped its entire teacher evaluation system and has moved to Marzano's Teacher Evaluation model. This has been a very difficult transition and today just was the icing on the cake. We had a staff meeting and the things we were told would be OK are now not OK. We were told at the beginning of the year we could use a generic scale to gauge student understanding, now today we are told that the generic scale isn't gonna be good enough, now we have to do individual scales for each and every learning goal/standard. I am so frustrated. My state is SO unorganized and its frustrating. They have decided that instead of rolling it out over a 3 year period they decided in July that the roll out would be in September. So instead of a 3 year roll out, they did a 3 month roll out, so we have administrators who have no idea what they are supposed to do! The administrators will say "well at our training we were told A...B...C..." so we all run around and do A B C and then 2 weeks later they come back and say "Well at my latest training I found out that A...B...C... is not what we are to be looking for, we are to be looking for X...Y...Z" and all I can think is W T F!!!!! I am just SO frustrated and for the first time in 12 years I am seriously considering leaving the profession. I LOVE teaching, but I don't know if I can deal with all this. I don't get paid enough nor do I get enough respect to deal with all this. I keep wondering if I should get out while the getting is good. I don't know what else I would do, but I have a Master's degree so I am sure I could do something. The sad thing is I have a Master's degree but my sister, who only has her GED, gets paid more than I do. I'm just so frustrated with all of this. I don't think the new evaluation system is fair because it seems to be all about paperwork and not about teaching. When did rubrics, scales, and scores become more important than the kids? I'm not sure I can live with those standards, I can't put paperwork ahead of kids. I just don't know what to do.