no eye-rolling in the DOE!

Sometimes, DOE professional development sessions could be terrible.

One particularly heinous meeting was on the Professional Teaching Standards. While I wouldn't have been in such a foul mood if we weren't in the hot and smelly cafeteria after school, and if the consultant from the DOE wasn't soul-less, I still wonder if it was necessary to choral read the standards with a group of 20 educators who had been teaching for 3 years or more.

While Principal Stilettos brought candy to mitigate my anger at the uncomfortable situation, I was surprisingly well-behaved during the entire meeting (a personal growth goal of mine this year).

In the middle of setting up our stupid role-play of the standards in hour 2 of the meeting, DOE consultant stops the conversing to look me right in the eye and say, "excuse me sir, is there an issue?" I'm in the middle of gnawing on chocolate and trying to place a card reading "data-driven instruction" into a role-play skit.

WTF? Stilettos pulls me aside after the meeting telling me she thought I rolled my eyes at her.

Get real. I would have said something to her face first.

While my bad mood may have sent bad karma waves and had me implicated for a rude crime I never committed, I still think the situation is a prime example of how the DOE chooses to assess schools based on teacher performance. Indeed, the DOE hecubus comes from the world of counting the number of words on your word wall, and making sure your kids' reading response entries are properly labeled and categorized. Disregarding the fact that my room has significant reading and math growth, and my kids get the good test scores, my performance as an educator will fall mostly on the aesthetics of my lesson plan binder when the DOE does their random "check-ups" on SoBro Elementary.

Indeed, many teachers before my school went "Empowerment" were fired for having ugly charts in their room. I believe it's unfortunate they were judged by their bulletin board trim rather than their promise in promoting student achievement.

Even more unfortunate is the DOE's version of keeping all teachers up to speed with the best teaching practices. Part of me says playing a board game on exemplar teaching practices is not keeping our 30 year veterans up to speed with how technology can be incorporated in the classroom, or teaching our new teachers how to differentiate their curriculum. Nor is it helping the teacher who reads the newspaper in the back of the room during instructional time.

Now is the time to develop teachers well and hold them accountable for their real results.

And no, I don't mean a bulletin board face-off.