I have been in the teaching domain and have worked as a coordinator for half a decade.
I have a good view of how teaching and learning happens in this domain.
Teaching comprises of principles and methods used by the teacher to enable student learning. These strategies are determined partly on the subject matter to be taught and partly by the nature of the learner.
Teaching approaches can be classified into teacher-centered and student-centered approach to learning. Whichever approach the teacher or the school follows, the end goal is to achieve a better Student Performance Rating. In order to achieve a good Student Performance Rating, what and how the school focuses on is important. Most schools do extra-teaching, extra-coaching, extra-working to make their students score more. Do you think this is really enough to make students Achieve SUCCESS? Being a coordinator, my role was to guide, monitor and evaluate teachers. I strongly believe in Teacher Evaluation being a key to an effective learning process. A well-designed process can help teachers to perform better at their jobs and this ultimately benefits students – but teachers believe any evaluation process should be fair, consistently applied and take into account the realities of the profession.
It is unreasonable for teachers to be evaluated simply based on how well the students perform on standardized tests. Students come from different backgrounds, and it’s not reasonable to assume that the teacher in an affluent neighborhood should produce students who score identically to students who attend school in an impoverished neighborhood. The goal of an evaluation process should be to assist teachers such that they receive more support and use it to develop action plans to improve. More teachers consistently said they are willing to support rigorous assessments, as long as they are realistic and are applied fairly and consistently. They also said the tone around the teacher evaluation debate needs to change and focus more on supporting, not punishing educators. “If the intent is to help a teacher improve, I believe that most teachers would welcome it.”
However, many schools do not conduct teacher evaluations, and many who conduct evaluations do not necessarily do so effectively. There are many reasons for this. A primary factor is TIME: evaluating every teacher at a school site multiple times a year and making sure the evaluations are in-depth and meaningful is very time consuming. With so much on their plates already, many administrators do not have time to do these comprehensive evaluations. Another reason is ORGANIZATION: with evaluations comes a plethora of paperwork. It can be hard to keep track of goals, who need to improve in what area, and who is excelling in their practice.
TRANSCEND – The Solution to effective teaching methodology
Educator effectiveness is one of the areas that have been under immense focus in education sector where technology could be leveraged to assess a teacher across multiple data points. Data driven teacher evaluations has been the point of discussion in recent years and the debate has been growing louder as the days go by. And we truly believe the answer is Transcend – designed to address the educator effectiveness requirements that are required in this challenging environment.
Transcend integrates teacher effectiveness solution with job embedded professional development. We decided to integrate these two modules into a single product quite simply because that seemed to be the most logical thing to do – as the two feed and grow on each other, each complementing the other.
Transcend provides Professional Development courses aligned with evaluation standards and goals to make it more meaningful and efficient to teachers. It supports multiple forms of PD delivery including online, offline and self-paced courses.
Teacher Observation
Transcend offers end to end solution to manage your teacher observation process with the focus on making the process transparent and efficient. The product is designed with focus to empower teachers and administrators and to make the process to move away from pen and paper approach to an integrated online solution.
PD Management
Our Professional Development Management System offers formal in-service training to ensure teacher’s content knowledge development through defined structure.
If as a school you are seeking to encourage and empower your teachers to focus on their performance, TRANSCEND would be the best available solution. Do reach out to us, we would be glad to hear about the challenges and we help you fix it, as teacher’s quality has a direct impact on students’ achievement.
