What to do with a bad evaluation

Ann,

I doubt this is what you are looking for, but my state has just passed legislation to improve the educational standards of teacher assistants. Prior to this time, they basically had to have a high school education. What we have been seeing is assistants with poor spelling and/or poor grammar who were just not adequately equipped to be good models for the students. In one class I worked with this past year, there was a new assistant who also missed a lot of days due to illness. There were many days subs were hired to replace her, but that is not good for the children either. She was not rehired for the coming year.

I am not suggesting that any of these issues may relate to you, but I am trying to help you understand that teacher assistants need to have good educational skills and be very reliable on the job. They need to take direction well from the teacher as well as having a good sense of how to spend time when one task is completed and the teacher is busy with another group. I have had some terrific assistants and some who were like having another student.

If you want to improve your skills and increase the likelihood of ever being rehired, I suggest you go to that principal and tell her that you realize you may have weaknessess and that you would appreciate her telling you what those areas are so that you can work on improving them as your desire is to return eventually to working at a school. Then seek to take training that will improve your skills.

Janis

It’s generally not a good idea to force yourself on people who don’t want to work with you. Even if the teacher knows your value, if the people in power don’t want you there, you’ll spend time and energy watching your back that should be spent on the students. I’d be looking elsewhere (unless it’s more important to win this fight than to be working with the kids), and with the current rather desperate shortage of people willing to work with special needs kids because so often it’s situations like this that they have to work in, you should be able to find something.

As far as the effect of the bad eval on your attempts to get the next job, you cna try to pretend that year never happened or explain that well, that situation was a bad one. I found it took me a couple of interviews after leaving a really bad situation before the bitterness and frustration weren’t like a cloud around me, so I”m glad they were interviews at schools I was pretty sure I didn’t want to go to (commuting distance, salary, job description issues). It’s tough when they ask you “do you have any questions” and you want to say “well, do you actually ever discipline any kids?” — that sorta doesn’t go over well :)

You poor thing.

Janis gave some very positive feedback, but I’m going to tell it like it is. This is exactly what gives teachers a bad name and causes conflict with parents. A BAD ATTITUDE.

Why is it “worst class” and the other teachers who wouldn’t stick up for you that was responsible for your bad evaluation? I find this hard to swallow. Don’t you see the big picture here? I give credit to the principal that realized she may have been passed a bad apple.

Future posters, please do not encourage this teacher to move on and poison another group of children until she is properly qualified.

Oh and by the way, preparing yourself for your chosen career is your responsibility. The parents seem to be able to find the websites, books etc. Why can’t an educated professional find their own resources? This claim surely doesn’t not support your defense.

Maybe working with special needs children just isn’t your cup of tea?

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I’ve had bad evaluations that I did not deserve, and good evaluations that may have been better than I deserved. I’ve had both good and bad evaluations in the same class in the same year in the same school, depending on which administrator did the evaluation — the old-fashioned one who had an open mind and was willing to understand that a creative art class involves motion and mess gave me good evaluations, and the “modern” one who wanted everything numbered and regimented and by the book gave me terrible evaluations.
I got a bad evaluation in the Grade 1-2 combined class with six LD kids in which the average was over 1.3 grade levels advance in reading in one year; I rocked the boat.
I got excellent evaluations in college teaching in my first year when I was still feeling my way and taught much less than I should have, and a terrible evaluation my last year there when I was handed three classes full of underprepared students and I was the one holding the bag. (The college wanted to improve the appearance of its pass rate, so students were pushed through placment tests and lower levels against policy and sense; the instructor who finally had to give out the D’s and F’s got the blame.)
In one school I worked in I got a terrible evaluation in a job that nobody could have succeeded in — I found out in December that the previous teacher, seeing the planned schedule, suddenly discovered she needed a sabbatical — it was a setup for failure, with 20-minute time blocks moving all the materials between classrooms so she left before *she* got burned by it — but a classroom teacher who had a difficult group and taught little or nothing got a good evaluation because the principal felt sorry for her.
My niece and nephew’s school went through three Grade 3 teachers in less than two years. Unfortunately nobody looked at the system and asked why Grade 3 teachers were being chewed up by it. It seems they had decided to use an individual progress at your own speed model in primary, but at the end of Grade 3 the kids were tested and tracked in a traditional manner. So the Grade 1 and 2 teachers had all sorts of fun, midwinter pool parties and making cakes and playing with computers, and the Grade 3 teacher suddenly had less than a year to catch up on three or four years of work, with kids who had negative work habits. It does seem strange that all the Grade 3 teachers always got bad evaluations and several were forced to leave teaching, while all the other grades got good evaluations, doesn’t it?
In other words, there is almost no consistency in teacher evaluations, especially in small schools where the evaluation is done by the boss who deals with you every day and has his own likes and dislikes. If you are the “right” kind of person, someone who is always sweet and doesn’t rock the boat, you’ll usually get good evaluations regardless of student achievement (seen the latest news reports of low school achievement, anyone?) If you rub certain “important” people the wrong way, you’ll usually get bad evaluations also regardless of student achievement. And if you are unlucky and get a difficult group or an impossible schedule, or are left carrying the can for previous levels that were not taught, then you lose.

There ARE poor teachers out there — but the standard evaluation process doesn’t spot them, often the reverse.
It is to be noted that some of the worst child molesters got excellent teacher evaluations; one in my area worked in schools for more than twenty years including eight as the principal, responsible for the kids he was molesting and for evaluating the other teachers. When he got close to being caught, three or four times, he was always just transferred another school where he continued the damage, because people liked him so much.

Back to the problem of the original question, being sick a lot can be very disruptive to the school and can lead to very negative evaluations.
Other than getting medical treatment and avoiding absences, the next thing to do is to apply to another school and start fresh and try to do better. You can tell people honestly at the interview that you were untrained and unprepared for this first job, and you want to learn more so you can do better (then DO read and watch and learn more).