High quality teaching instruction is one of the most, significant elements when it comes to levels of student achievement. The purpose of teacher evaluations is to help teachers reflect on their practice, highlight areas of excellence, and get support in needed areas. When teacher evaluations are conducted purposefully and with the ultimate goal of student achievement in mind, teacher evaluations can definitely be a powerful tool. As a building leader intern, I was provided the opportunity of not only attending training on being an effectively evaluating teachers and staff, but I was also assigned two teacher to evaluate quarterly. Throughout this process I was able to identify some strengths and weaknesses in our school's evaluating process. 

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Strengths: 

• Everyone who evaluated staff were properly trained and certified. 

• Staff members were all provided an hour of uninterrupted time to be properly evaluated

• Post-conferences were conducted within 72 hours of the observation

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Weaknesses: 

• Although everyone was trained to evaluate staff, oftentimes there was no inner-rater reliability because only one person was present during the observation. 

• Evaluators were only trained once, during their initial training

• Due to time constraints, post-conferences were not always conducted

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Reflection:

Of course, my school has some areas to improve in when it comes to improving evaluations, and therefore as a future building leader, I will implement the following ideas:

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• Allow evaluators to record lessons for inner-rater reliability if there cannot be two people present during the observation. Both will turn in scores to compare, as well as the teacher's self-reflection scores. 

• Provide documentation for proof of post-conference

• Ensure that all evaluators are scheduling observations within the time window (within one week of the beginning date and one week from the ending date.