Top 10 Teacher Observations and Teacher Evaluation Tricks

Advancement in many school districts is tied to teacher performance evaluations. If you get a poor teacher evaluation, you may get stuck teaching six sections of remedial English in the school basement. That's why the teacher observation is so important. If you mess up during the teacher observation, your teacher evaluation will be negative. If your teacher evaluation is negative, you'll be limited. Even if you transfer to a new school, the teacher performance evaluations come with you. That's why you need to implement these teacher observation tricks.

1. The Green Highlighter: The green highlighter trick requires teamwork. Each teacher in your wing gets a green highlighter. When one teacher is observed or about to be observed, he sends a green highlighter via a responsible student to all neighboring teachers.
2. The Teacher Network: Form a network with teachers in your area. When one is observed, he or she spreads the word during the next passing period.
3. Left Hand - Right Hand: This requires training your students before the observation. It's easy. Tell them anytime there's an administrator in the room and you're having a class discussion or lecture, do the following: if you know the answer to the question, raise your right hand; if you don't know the answer or don't want to answer, raise your left hand. Your administrator will be amazed by your ability to get your class to participate.
4. Administrator Drills: Make your class practice what to do if someone comes in. On those days you have 10-15 minutes left in class but don't feel like doing anything, instruct students to open a book or take out a slice of paper. Tell them they don't have to do anything, but if somebody walks in they need to pretend to work on an assignment. Practice by walking in and out a few times.
5. Emergency Lesson Plan: Once teacher evaluation season rolls around, have a lesson plan ready to go. Make sure you write the procedures on the board and leave it there until you have to use it.
6. Assignment in Reserve: It happens quite often. Your administrator comes in and you're trying to kill 10-minutes. What do you do? You hand back a "special assignment" and go over it.
7. Quiz in Reserve: This is the close relative of emergency lesson plan and assignment in reserve. Have a multiple choice quiz handy. Make sure it includes an essay question, just in case.
8. Computer Attendance: Always have your attendance ready to click on. That will prevent the nosy administrator from finding out you've been reading articles on brighthub all day.
9. Fake Sick: Everyone has those days. Maybe you got in a fight with your spouse; maybe your favorite team lost a big game; or maybe you just didn't feel like preparing anything. Here's what you do. Tell your administrator how grateful you are to see him or her. Mention how sick you are. Ask him to cover your class and sprint out of the room. At this point you can either gag yourself and throw up in a trashcan outside your classroom or run to the bathroom, put water on your face, and come back in a few minutes. Either way, your administrator will assume the reason your lesson is horrible is because you're sick.
10. Do Your Job: I suppose you could just do your job well.