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Evaluations are part and parcel of the modern work environment, even more so for teachers whose job performance has a large impact on the lives of other people--notably children, who, if you haven't noticed, hold a dear place in the hearts of policy-makers, bureaucrats, journalists and, even parents.

So, let's go down that road:  How should we be evaluating teachers?

All right. Time to put some cards on the table. Face up.

I have been nibbling around the edges of explaining why and how cooperative learning has changed my life as a teacher--everything from multiplying learning to building a learning community--and now I want to explain how I do it. I call this strategy cooperative learning because I took the principles from the Johnson Brothers work at the University of Minnesota. In truth, though, it's a modified cooperative strategy that I have developed into a full-fledged way of organizing classroom activities and pedagogy on an everyday basis.

Parents are the indispensable third leg of the stool that sits squarely underneath the animal from which we hope to get so many good things. In a way, of course, a really big way, there's no one who can derive more effort from a young person than parents. After all, it was their native genius that brought Jack or Jill into the world to begin with. If they can't convince them to study and work, what are teachers, miracle workers? Faith-healers?

Yet, it does take a village--maybe even an internet learning community-- to make a kid whole and so we arrive at Parent-Teacher Conferences--a time to meet the creators. And, for those new to this: trust me, it will be a wonderful learning experience, in many ways.

In the cyclic ritual that is a school year, the first milepost marker, at least in the Midwest, is the arrival of fall conferences. Here, you have a set of parent-teacher conferences in mid-October, and then get a two day break, Thursday-Friday of the third week to attend "professional conferences."

I'll deal with Parent Conferences in a separate post because they are wholly worthy of their own attention-comment-preparation, but I want to talk about the conferences run by the union.

I am not a great fan of standardized testing, especially the high-stakes kind, in which the consequences of not doing well can result in extreme negative consequences for the test-taker.

I have laid out in a fairly extensive and well-documented article just what it is that makes standardized testing the wrong approach in terms of developing young minds and helping them find a productive path to work, citizenship and personal fulfillment.