Blogging Challenge - Day 3

For most of my life, I have absolutely hated any sort of personal evaluation.  I was never bothered so much by school-based exams... I suppose they always seemed a bit removed from the whole process to me.  I would complete the test and be given a grade and that would be the end of it.  Where I haven't always felt comfortable is the whole issue of owning up to my knowledge and/or performance.  I'm not sure 100% sure why, but I think I always felt that not doing as well as I was expected to do would be viewed as a personal letdown to whomever happened to be critiquing me.  

For the first few years of my career, I often struggled to put teacher evaluations in their proper perspective.  I would spend hours and hours agonizing over how I would need to create and maintain the perfect conditions in order to showcase personal excellence.  I would be meticulously detailed in my lesson-planning, often investing the time to come up with multiple backup plans.  I thought that I was being prudent in these preparations and that I would be able to demonstrate just how awesome I could be with my abundance of planning.  Instead, I would work myself into a stressed-out mess, exhausted from my efforts, and too worried about my performance to focus on what was actually happening in my classroom.  In many ways, I would fail the ultimate test for a teacher: I was not myself.

Now, that isn't to say that any of what I was doing was necessarily bad.  An educator should be prepared and organized.  They should know what they are trying to do and have a plan for how to get there.  However, in my attempts to be perfect in my own sphere, I would neglect and overlook the more pressing needs of those in my classroom and 'their' learning would not be all that it truly could.

Having secured a continuous teaching contract is without a doubt, a huge relief, but I have never looked at it as something that would liberate me forever from another evaluation.  Rather, I feel like I can appreciate it more for what it is: an attempt by my colleagues in the profession to further enhance what I can do.

As part of my goals for the year, I have been trying to showcase not just what I can do, but more of what my students can accomplish as I put into practice the philosophies of cooperative learning.  I am trying to not look at my evaluations (which still happen) as a chance to mainly show how much control I can have.  My desire is for my admin team to be able to see that I can put the principles that I am learning into practice by trusting my students a bit more with their own learning.  I want them to be able to observe that I can provide a learning environment where students have genuine direction and motivation to push themselves and engage others in this whole process.  In short, I want that spotlight to shine less on myself and more on those who find themselves in my classroom.

~Mr.T