Formative and Sumative Evaluations - Essay Example

The methods of actual teaching and of evaluating teachers are also affected by these advancements. With the changing world, the need to adapt methods of measuring teachers' performance was seen as necessary. "As the technological age continues to render traditional classroom practices obsolete, many educators are still untrained and apprehensive when it comes to technology integration. Therefore, a paradigm shift is needed that requires more than just a quick-fix staff development solution, especially since the No Child Left Behind Act stipulates that educators must be "highly qualified" by the end of the 2005-06 school year.

This leads to the expectation that teachers will create learning environments which challenge and broaden their students' comprehensive use of technology" (Janice M. Hinson, 2005). However, recent studies show that although computers and internet are highly accesible to the teacher, with the figure reaching 99%, only 39% are found to have integrated the use of technology in their lesson. Of these figure, only 33% feel that they are preapred to integrate technology tot heir teaching, while the other 66% felt that they are somewhat prepared or not at all.(NCES). "So, it should come as no surprise that while many principals want to improve technology integration in their schools, they just do not know how or where to begin.

They realize that to promote meaningful technological changes, their teachers must be given opportunities to acquire the skills needed to use technology and then apply them in the context of the curriculum" (Multimedia Schools, 2003). "However, technology professional development is usually delivered by district-level personnel as "one-size-fits-all" workshops that focus on techniques for using software packages and management tools. These workshops often are not part of a cohesive improvement plan; thus, instructional changes are not adopted or sustained over time" (Janice M.

Hinson, 2005).Teacher Evaluation is a very important practice that helps ensure this development among teachers. It is very important so that ineffective teacher evaluation systems are seen to be more costly than effective ones. (Sawa, 1995) This statement edifies the importance of a sound and truthful evalutation technique. A Brief History It has been known that the appraisal of teachers is as old as teaching itself (Sawa, 1995). However, formal teacher's evaluation was traced to have begun at the turn of the 20th century to about 1980 (Robert F.

McNergney). It's history might be divided into three overlapping categories: (1) The Search for Great Teachers; (2) Inferring Teacher Quality from Student Learning; and (3) Examining Teaching Performance (Robert F. McNergney)."Arvil Barr's 1948 compendium of research on teaching competence noted that supervisors' ratings of teachers were the metric of choice. A few researchers, however, examined average gains in student achievement for the purpose of Inferring Teacher Quality from Student Learning.

They assumed, for good reason, that supervisors' opinions of teachers revealed little or nothing about student learning. Indeed, according to Medley and his colleagues, these early findings were "most discouraging." The average correlation between teacher characteristics and student learning, as measured most often by achievement tests, was zero. Some characteristics related positively to student