Teaching, as a profession, can be a lot of things. It can be exciting, challenging and rewarding, but it can also be demoralizing, frustrating, and just plain exhausting. However, it is almost always stressful. After all, being largely responsible for the performance of dozens–sometimes hundreds–of students is a quite demanding for anyone. Add to that the fact that once you head home you still have papers to grade, homework to check, and lessons to plan, and you can quickly see why teaching is widely considered to be one of the most work-intensive professions out there, right after coal miner and stevedore.

Naturally, it\’s important to our society as a whole that we make sure teachers are doing a good job. After all, these are our children, and they represent the future of our country. They will grow up to be businessmen, doctors, politicians, and members of every other profession under the sun–including, of course, more teachers. So what is the best way to make sure teachers are performing their demanding tasks up to standard? Well, enter the teacher evaluation, a controversial way to measure teacher effectiveness. While it is intended to ensure that our children are getting the best education they can, some people think it might get in the way of teachers teaching effectively.

Well, there\’s plenty of reasons to see the evaluation as a problem. After all, as we\’ve just discussed, teachers\’ jobs can be exceptionally hectic as it is. Why give them one more thing to worry about? It\’s entirely possible that stress about an upcoming evaluation can cause an otherwise competent teacher to experience a drop in performance, right at the time of the evaluation, which creates an inaccurate picture of that teacher\’s abilities, to say nothing of the fact that it could cost a hard-working person his job and a group of kids the opportunity to learn from a quality teacher. Furthermore, there may be some very uninspiring teachers out there who, while technically within the satisfactory range of the standards tested in the teacher evaluation, may still possess some intangible negative qualities that impede the progress of their students. It may be difficult for school to get rid of such a teacher who seems to have good performance reviews but actually does not do a good job with students in the classroom.

On the other hand, it is important to evaluate our teachers in some way to ensure that they are doing well–accountability is the first step to good performance. Perhaps it would be good to incorporate feedback from the students and parents themselves as part of the evaluation–that way teachers can be appraised by a more varied pool of people. It may also help to use a less rigid, more holistic approach for the evaluations themselves, with room to comment on certain qualities that many current systems leave out. Whether you\’re talking about elementary, middle, or high school, public or private, it definitely needs to be a priority to evaluate teachers fairly so they can focus on their demanding work.

Author Bio: Diana Washington is a writer for the Test Prep Blog Testing Is Easy. She writes on many topics related to education, with a special focus on teaching, standardized testing, and ISEE Prep, a growing concern for parents of children trying to get into private schools.

Category: Education
Keywords: teacher evaluation,education,high school,middle school,elementary school,public,private,school