Teachers are always blamed for an educational system that is more often than not created by those around them, administrators, or community. One teacher who is going through exactly the same kind of crap that our school is going through, created this video and put it on YouTube.
Focus walks are one of the school "reforms" that are designed to get teachers to see their coworkers techniques and styles. It is intended to improve instruction. However, the problem is that they are too structured and controlled, and provide little feedback to either party. I have often said that administrators are incompetent and incorrectly apply business models to education. This video portrays their repression and ignorance. This is real, what we actually have to deal with.
This video is about collaborative planning, which is teachers planning units, common formative and summative assessments. Like focus walks, they are too strictly controlled, and in our case, used to divide and criticize. When one teacher's students score well on the assessment, and another teacher's students don't, the data is used as an excuse to criticize, instead of learn and grow. Our building works under the "gotcha" system, and the current climate is one of terrorism from fools.
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