In today’s challenging educational climate, cultivating a school culture where teachers feel valued and supported should be one of our most urgent leadership priorities. Therefore, examining best practices around teacher evaluations, and recognizing what impedes their proper implementation, is essential. Executing evaluations as a practice done solely to comply with policies, rather than as a considered process to advance both teachers and their students, can leave teachers disconnected from their professional practices and feeling unseen. Providing teachers the opportunity to grow and experience success depends on leaders’ ability to nurture a collaborative culture of professionalism, transparency, and respect. Two proven practices that contribute to such a culture are teacher evaluator training around unconscious bias and effective implementation of a clear, agreed-upon framework for talking about teaching and learning.
ADDRESSING UNCONSCIOUS BIAS
Equitable and Growth-Focused Teacher Evaluations By Aparna Sundaram & Lindsay Prendergast, Ed.D.
The Role of Unconscious Bias in Equitable Teacher Evaluations Before engaging in fair, productive conversations with teachers about instructional practice, leaders must recognize how unconscious bias can influence their own interpretation of those practices. Biases are mental shortcuts that we all use, and unconscious or implicit biases can guide our behaviors without us being aware of their impact. As Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald explain in Blindpsot: Hidden Biases of Good People (2016), “the signal property of the mind does a great deal of its work automatically, unconsciously, and unintentionally” and they stress that this is “ordinary mental functioning.” To be human is to have biases. However, for those in supervisory positions, it’s crucial to accept the existence of unconscious biases and consider methods for mitigating their impact. While many types of bias exist, a few are especially pervasive in teacher evaluations and can impede meaningful professional collaboration towards growth. Affinity bias is the tendency to be influenced by personal preferences for specific practices or behaviors similar to our own and that we perceive as favorable. For example, administrators who tend to work extra-long hours may have less favorable opinions of teachers who work regular hours, or an extroverted administrator may believe an extroverted teacher is an inherently better math teacher. In fact, the two things are actually independent of each other. Banaji and Greenwald note, “Economists, sociologists and psychologists have confirmed time and again that the social group to which a person belongs can be isolated as a definitive cause of the treatment he or she receives” (2016). This does not just refer to negative treatment, but includes preferential treatment as well. Attribution bias is the inclination to make judgments about behaviors as though they were inherent personality traits. If someone is successful at something, we may downplay it as luck rather than their actions, and failures may be linked to their personality rather than outside factors. For example, a leader may attribute teacher performance, such as the ability to manage student behavior, as inherent to their character (disinterest in building connections with students, for example) rather than situational context. On the other hand, they may attribute a teacher’s ability to connect well with students to her younger age, not recognizing she has worked hard to develop communication, trust-building, and listening skills geared toward adolescents. Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret information in a manner that confirms or supports pre-existing beliefs about a teacher, even when the evidence is to the contrary. The horn or halo effect is a subset of confirmation bias. For example, with the horn effect, if an
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EARCOS Triannual Journal