Evaluating Teachers by Video Tape Lessons and Portfolios

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Evaluating Teachers by Video Tape Lessons and Portfolios
Rick Garlikov

Two of the current fashions in evaluating the teaching ability of education students and teachers, are to use (1) portfolios of sample lessons they have done, perhaps including student results and the teacher's evaluations of those student projects and papers, and (2) video taped classroom instruction sessions.

There are serious problems with both of these approaches and neither gets to the heart of evaluating a teacher's ability to teach.

Video Taped Classes

The camera does not normally portray anything the way it is actually perceived by people. To tape something so that it comes across in viewing the way it actually came across in person requires using professional video techniques not likely to be used in these evaluation tapes. Typically the camera is set up on a tripod at the back of the room, aimed toward the front on a fairly wide angle that encomposses the width of the room, and set to roll. The microphone on the camera is left to pick up the sound; the teacher will not have a wireless lapel microphone. The voices of the teacher and the students will typically be tinny, distant, and flat in the sense of not having much inflection. Certainly any nuances in volume, tone, and inflection will be lost.

The teacher's actions will look cold or distracting. The teacher's facial expressions will be fairly indiscernible. All nuance will be lost. A teacher that talks with her hands, no matter how expressive and interesting that might be in person, will appear on tape to be gyrating for no reason, as if s/he had some sort of nervous condition. The best teacher in the world, doing his/her best teaching ever, will appear lifeless and ineffective, both visually and audibly, if video taped from the back of a room by a camera mounted on a tripod set at wide or medium angle, using the camera's own microphone. None of the feeling of warmth, intimacy, humor, and direct psychological contact between each student and the teacher that might have occurred will show up on the tape. That is not the proper way to tape a teaching experience, and it is not fair to any teacher.

A camera set up that way simply does not capture things the way the human mind does in person. Anyone who has ever audio tape-recorded a really animated and interesting conversation, will be able to tell you that on playback the conversation will almost always sound dead, and filled with boring pauses, and all kinds of distracting and extraneous noises. Neither the pauses nor the noises were part of the consciousness of anyone partipating in the converation, but neither can be ignored when listening to the tape. Anyone who has even photographed something that seemed really attractive or interesting to them will normally be disappointed in the photographs because the subject will seem cold and distant, will have shadows that are terribly distracting, will have background objects in distracting places, and will typically have way too much space on either side of it. The main subject will just not appear in the photograph the way they appeared to the consciousness of the person taking it. Unless one is an accomplished photographer.

Oppositely, if a Hollywood director and crew video-taped and edited a lesson, even a terrible lesson could probably be made to look really interesting, exciting, and successful. There is a good reason why it takes something like three months to a year to film a 90 minute movie. It takes much staging, lighting, editing, camera locations, and a host of other things to make everything look normal to the viewer and yet also bring it to life. How things are filmed and recorded is as important as what is filmed or recorded. The only "true" recording is one that captures action in a way that when someone watches it replayed, they perceive it pretty much the way they perceived it when it was occurring. Unfortunately that may be different for different people. It is not that there is no true recording of any activity but that there are many true ones, and many, many more false ones. A video recording of a classroom session is pretty worthless as a means of evaluating the teaching that went on, unless the content of the teaching itself is so poorly done that filming style would not have saved it, no matter who was filming it; and even that might take a viewer who is knowledgeable about filming to be able to tell.

Portfolios

The problem with portfolios is that even if they show some kind of success (or failure) in a particular lesson or kind of lesson, that may not be indicative of the teacher's ability, just as seeing some brilliant landscape photographer's portfolio will not give you a clue at how well s/he might photograph a wedding. A portfolio does not necessarily show how a teacher solves problems in teaching. It is a record of past performance but not necessarily of the thinking that went into making that performance or that might make a future performance (more) successful. When stock brokers call, they almost always say that stocks outperform all other financial vehicles over the past 100 years or so. I always tell them that does not do me any good, since I missed those opportunities. What I want to know is how they will do over the next twenty or thirty years if I invest with them. Of course, they cannot know that. A typical teaching portfolio has similar problems in that a possibly few well-taught lessons or productive projects does not necessarily show general teaching quality or ability, particularly in situations where the students might be quite different.

Then How Can Teachers Be Reasonably Evaluated for Hiring?

Bring in some students, and watch the teacher teach them something the students do not already know. Have the teacher teach something perhaps easy and something difficult. Perhaps observe a number of teaching sessions with different students at different times. Do the students get it? Does it pique their interest? Are they inspired to learn more along the same lines and/or excited about what they have just learned? Does the teacher seem to react reasonably to the students and to their needs? Speak with the students to find out what they actually learned, and what they think they learned. Ask the teacher how s/he thinks it went, and what his/her evidence is. The test of whether someone can teach or not is whether they can teach or not so that students learn and appreciate what they have learned in an actual teaching situation, not how they appear on tape and not whether they ever taught a few things possibly pretty well in perhaps optimal circumstances. Of course, there may be some students who, and some topics which, are more difficult than others to teach, and judgment will have to be used (and discussion with the teacher later) about what the teacher did that was right or wrong, or what might have been better to do if anything. How would the teacher do it differently if doing it again, etc? But the crucial issue will be whether the students learned what the teacher was teaching, or whether after some reflection the teacher could teach another group of students that material better. And whether the teacher gives evidence of being able to do this for different students and different topics.

And do not judge the teacher on the basis of whether s/he uses the "proper" technique, usually meaning the technique that is in vogue. Teaching is not about technique; it is about results. Do the students learn. A teacher who uses modern techniques but whose students learn very little, is like a surgeon who performs technically "successful" operations where patients die. One would normally rather live through a surgery and be cured, regardless of the doctor's technique than to die in a technically perfect demonstration of ability.

Evaluating teachers is not likely to be easy, because many matters of judgment are not easy. But substituting an easy method for one that requires wisdom is not to overcome a difficulty inherent in evaluation, just to ignore it.