8.23.10 – What’s the best relationship between teachers and students? Love? Admiration? Respect? What would you do if your class were deeply involved in a creative project, like a movie or a newspaper or a play, and the principal came along and said you had to get back to basics because standardized test time was coming up?
Those were the kinds of questions that teachers in Riverview Gardens faced over the summer when they wanted to get rehired for their jobs, after the district was taken over by a state-appointed board. For years, teachers around the country have been tested in the same way by the Haberman Star Teacher program, which tries to determine who is most likely to succeed in a school environment that seems to get tougher every year.
“Districts can use it as a screener to get some idea of what undergirding ideology a teacher has,” says Delia Stafford, president of the Haberman Educational Foundation based in Houston, Texas.
“There’s no content on there. We can teach those things. What you can’t do is find out how they will connect with kids. Do they understand at-risk education and the causes of it? What is the school’s role? If you can’t connect with the kids, if you don’t see it as a responsibility to make sure every child has the opportunity to learn, it doesn’t matter how much science and math you have.”
Stafford says the decades of research done by Martin Haberman, boiled down to 50 questions on a screening test that are also the basis of a follow-up interview, have proved to be a reliable indicator of who will succeed in the classroom, dealing with students, administrators and the other pressures teachers face.
But Riverview Gardens teachers who lost their jobs when their contracts were not renewed aren’t so easily convinced that the Haberman method, with its series of multiple-choice questions, is a good way to make sure students get the best school staff.
Between the questions that were asked, and the way the district handled the hiring process — jammed into a summer where every contract, personnel and otherwise, had to be reviewed — they feel a lot of people who had dedicated their professional lives to a difficult district were unfairly cast aside.
“I think you have to actually see a person teach to see how they teach, not take a test online or interview them,” said Marianne Catalino, who taught first grade for 10 years in Riverview Gardens and was a teacher for 17 years before that.
“With some of the questions, I thought all of the answers made sense. But when you ask why you won’t be hired, they won’t give you any answers. In my 27 years of teaching, I’ve never been treated this way.”
The screening test from Haberman consists of 50 multiple-choice questions, where prospective teachers are asked to choose the best of three possible answers. Because the test is proprietary, Stafford asked that the exact questions and answers not be used here, but it’s easy enough to give the flavor of what is involved.
The test is designed to gauge how successful someone would be in a classroom based on 10 separate areas: persistence, organization and planning, value of student learning, theory to practice, teaching at-risk students, approach to students, survival in a bureaucracy, explaining teacher success, explaining student success and fallibility.
More specifically, it tries to measure how someone who wants to teach would relate to students. For example, several questions try to determine how the test taker feels about this question: Is the most important factor in classroom success love, respect or admiration between teacher and student?
Because the screening process is often used for districts where students are described as “at-risk,” several questions deal with discipline problems and why they occur. Can they be attributed to community violence? Racism in society as a whole? Teachers who take a bad situation and make it worse?
Why do so many teachers, even those who do well, leave the classroom after just a few years? The questions try to get at the issue of burnout and how someone would deal with the inevitable bureaucratic tangles that ensnare all institutions but schools seem to have more than others.
And the main reason for schools in the first place — academic achievement by students — isn’t ignored. Though the test doesn’t try to measure how well a prospective teacher knows the subject matter at hand, whether it’s Shakespeare, the sine curve or the Soviet Union, it does ask about what may be the best use of grades and the best way to get through to students.
Sumber: http://www.educationnews.org/ednews_today/99131.html
