{"id":3468,"date":"2011-06-06T17:31:28","date_gmt":"2011-06-06T21:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=3468"},"modified":"2011-06-06T17:39:58","modified_gmt":"2011-06-06T21:39:58","slug":"send-in-the-peer-reviewers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=3468","title":{"rendered":"Send in the peer reviewers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Largely in response to Michael Winerip's celebratory article about teacher peer review<\/a> in Montgomery County, Maryland, Andy Rotherham argues today<\/a> that peer review is better at sussing out the "observably poor teaching" than "unobservably poor instruction." Rotherham describes what he means by observably poor teaching: teachers who cannot manage a class, cannot organize material or students, etc. I'm very curious what he means by "unobservably poor instruction," which one comment at Rotherham's blog calls "secret sauce" (i.e., undefined). Or may be we should treat the term as the educational equivalent of dark matter. "Ramp up the LHC, boys; it's time to find those bad teachers!" (That's my quip, not Steve F.'s.) <\/p>\n

I have different concerns. First is money. From what I can tell of the peer review in development in Hillsborough County, Florida, it's labor-intensive. That in itself is something to watch: in a system where certified teachers are with students 100% of the instructional day*, can a school system without Gates money afford the type of intensive observation system Hillsborough is trying? For this question it doesn't matter whether the observers are fellow teachers or assistant principals or some other group, though I very much think peers or former teachers from outside the school are the better choices. The point is that the time of certified teachers is expensive and limited. If your budget revolves around that 100%-certified-teacher time, the budgetary consequences of peer review may get very interesting for my local school system in four years' time. <\/p>\n

The second concern is culture and scale. Here, the problem is in scaling down, not scaling up. In a large school district such as here in Hillsborough County or in Montgomery County, a peer review system can be developed at the district level with a reasonably consistent approach. In a large district, you can have observers be from outside the school. But what if you're in one of the tiny New Jersey districts where there is one or two schools per grade level? I can easily see something that's called peer review but has all the problems of an incestuous faculty culture (whether it's mutually destructive or get-along-go-along). And what if peer review looks very different in Teaneck than in surrounding districts such as Bergenfield, Hackensack, Englewood, and Englewood Cliffs? Then the problems of peer review will feed into the same small-district politics we see today instead of being a solution. <\/p>\n

* I mean by that the model that relies on the presence of a certified teacher wherever students are in a classroom. Teachers do have planning periods, on a relatively limited basis in most of the U.S. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Largely in response to Michael Winerip's celebratory article about teacher peer review in Montgomery County, Maryland, Andy Rotherham argues today that peer review is better at sussing out the "observably poor teaching" than "unobservably poor instruction." Rotherham describes what he means by observably poor teaching: teachers who cannot manage a class, cannot organize material or students, etc. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-TW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3468"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3471,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3468\/revisions\/3471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}