Life Beyond the Classroom: Evaluations for the Future
The question of how to best evaluate teachers has as many different answers as the number of people you ask, but it almost always becomes muddied by the very structure of the scholastic environment. We have standardized testing to contend with, tenure to think about, and school boards trying their best to satisfy both the needs of the students and the bottom line of the school corporation.
Ted Dintersmith has an idea: Why aren’t we spending more time preparing kids for life outside of the classroom? When so much of a child’s future success depends on learning practical life skills, why aren’t we teaching more of that in schools? And, were schools to switch to the life-skills model instead of the “teach the test” model, how do we track which teachers are most effective?
The idea that schools often fail to prepare students for life beyond academia isn’t a new one, but implementing the kinds of changes necessary to “flip the classroom” proves to be harder than it sounds. Whether or not No Child Left Behind had been successful, it was a classic example of how even at the federal level, instituting philosophical changes to the way we teach our kids is about as easy as herding cats.
Read more in our latest blog post.