Evaluation And Assessment Of Special Education - 2122 Words

When working in the field of special education, one must become intimately familiar with evaluations and assessments. Any individualized education plan worth its salt is laden with proposed or completed data from evaluations and/or assessments both summative and formative. Which I believe is a vital piece to every individualized plan in special education that successfully removes the access barriers confronting students and allowing them the greatest academic potential. Yet in the past when it came to teacher evaluations, I have had an extreme bias in believing they had any worth or value at all. I felt this was a bureaucratic evil that only increased the anxiety level of individuals attempting to do their finest with students. At best,†¦show more content†¦Even more frustration comes in because I feel like my students would have been greatly impacted if I had administrators that actually believed positively in the evaluation system and used it to support the building of eff ective teaching practices. With this all said I do not desire to point the finger or cast stones at those individuals that gave me the privilege of working in this wonderful profession. But through them I have learned how powerful it is to have a vision, be able to articulate it, and implement said vision by doing the â€Å"right work† (Marzano, Waters and McNulty 76). The implementation of SB 290 came at a time of transition for my district. The superintendent, who was in his fourth year, had the entire district working on developing and aligning essential outcomes though newly formed professional learning communities when SB 290 came to fruition. Every teacher was being told that we knew what was best for our students, so work together and decided on what we think is essential for our students to learn. On top of that, we were being told to use proficiencies to determine if our students were learning and expected to develop these proficiencies along with common formative assessments. We were directed to do this work inside the bubble of our newly formed PLC’s. I should also mention that our superintendent had a low value for outside professional development, so the only training that came during this time