EdBrief Home | Human Resources
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EdBrief Home | Human Resources |
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Tips for Moving Gracefully, With Your Partner, Through 'The Dance of Negotiation' It was back in December 1981 when Time Magazine columnist Lance Morrow wrote the essay “The Dance of Negotiation.”1 My career as a professional negotiator was already well under way (I was about six years into the field at that point in time). Even so, I was startled that his thoughtful, wise and incisive article “in praise of” negotiations so precisely enlightened me as to why I love the purpose and art of negotiation. I also recall how dismayed I was that so many of my colleagues in educational administration loathed Morrow’s piece!... "Value Added" Administration Can Contribute to Student Learning Process One of the more popular terms in industry at present is “value added.” While the term draws from macroeconomics, the education industry has embraced it in a redefinition that goes something like this: “The term ‘value-added’ refers to a growth model used to analyze student assessment results in such a way as to determine the ‘value’ that a school contributes to a student's learning progress during a particular time period.”... RTTT and SIG Require School Districts to Implement Teacher Evaluation System Race to the Top (RTTT) guidelines and School Improvement Grant (SIG) funds require districts to create teacher evaluation systems that include student assessment scores in the evaluation. In June, The National Board Resource Center at Stanford University released a report on teacher evaluation systems entitled “A Quality Teacher in Every Classroom”. This report was written by the Accomplished California Teacher Network and is based on input from high performing teachers... Analysis Teacher Evaluation Systems Need Change – Here Are Three Ideas to Make Things Better In my view, teacher evaluation systems in California public schools need considerable reform and change. We have used the checklist approach for many years, and even with the use of the California Standards for the Teaching Profession, the forms continue to be boxes to be checked with little or no inter-rater reliability from evaluator to evaluator. In other words, principals are not thoroughly trained and retrained on a regular basis to ensure that from one principal to another the standards are being applied evenly, fairly, and rigorously... Remind Yourself – Collective Bargaining Doesn't Have to be a Negative Experience More often than not, colleagues in Human Resources express frustration, anger, and even contempt for their unions. And it may be fair to say that if a poll was taken of all school administrators about the value of collective bargaining in the school districts, the results would dip to a point somewhere between “zero” and “hardly any.” This is unfortunate (to say the least) since the collective bargaining process is part of the law... |
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