Building adminsistrators are no more qualified to assess the work of teachers than teachers are qualified to do the reverse and assess their work. True, building administrators can assess if the kids are involved or not, but since kids are always “involved” when administrators come into a classroom, those evaluations don’t mean much.
Plus, we rarely can just let loose and be ourselves when being observed. The view of the teaching is almost always a skewed one and the administrator rarely gets a feel for the fun of the various aspects of comprehension based methods, mainly because, even after many years, most of us still feel awkward driving the CI car when being observed. The observor changes what is being observed.
If, when money comes into the district, a team of data experts is hired to look at numbers in the district offices (this has happened in Denver Public Schools), nothing much will happen. People who put the microscope on what a teacher is doing in the classroom without really knowing much about foreign language pedagogy, in particular Krashen, and then criticize that teacher for not being perfect, illustrating Bryce’s comment of a few months ago about the Dunning–Kruger effect.
The Problem with CI
Jeffrey Sachs was asked what the difference between people in Norway and in the U.S. was. He responded that people in Norway are happy and
