Having worked on the Dickens in Lowell (Massachusetts) celebration — an event series marking the bicentenary of Charles Dickens's birth and commemorating his 1842 trip to Lowell — my wife, Beth, has her antennae up for any reference to Dickens and for finding ways to infuse his wisdom into daily conversation. Once you start paying attention, it's not as hard as it seems. Dickens speaks as clearly to our times as to his own — especially regarding the wealth divide and the plight of the poor.
One of the quotes Beth offered me recently encapsulates the essential irony in the life of Lady Dedlock, a wealthy character in Bleak House who lives comfortably in the illusion of her own superiority:
"[Lady Dedlock] supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach and ken of ordinary mortals.... Yet every dim little star revolving about her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian Opera, knows her weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and caprices and lives upon as accurate a calculation and as nice a measure of her moral nature as her dressmaker takes of her physical proportions.... There are deferential people in a dozen callings whom my Lady Dedlock suspects of nothing but prostration before her, who can tell you how to manage her as if she were a baby, who do nothing but nurse her all their lives...."
For a brief moment, I felt my own wave of superiority. The joke is on Lady Dedlock. All those around her not only know this wrench-tight woman well, they also know how to play her. But then I saw the deeper truth in this quote. We may not be as rich or as haughty as Lady Dedlock, but I think we are all less inscrutable than we imagine. When we live and work with people for years on end, all of our character flaws, our foibles, our habits, our prejudices — as well as our strengths and goodness — become as visible as the sea. We are all known better than we think.
Perhaps it's a stretch here to say this, but I will anyway. Teaching is a communal act. It makes perfect sense that teachers have a certain level of control over their classrooms, both content and pedagogy. But it makes little sense that we teach day after day in isolation from other adults. We are known better than we think — and we can all benefit from healthy conversations about the craft of teaching. We can all benefit from observing and being observed — from opening our hearts and classroom doors to valued colleagues.
None of us wants the disheartening, punitive, formal evaluation that rates teachers based on the results of standardized, machine-graded bubble tests. That kind of systems thinking is better suited for the making of widgets — not for the complex process of educating a panoply of children to become smart and interesting and emotionally adjusted adults.
But there's no doubt that, given the complexity of our work, and its evolutionary nature, we can always learn more, always improve our skills, continue to adapt to our shifting culture, and hone our knowledge of how best to help children learn.
Maybe we just need to stop thinking of "evaluation" as "evaluation." Maybe we should just call it "mutually respectful professional support" — and see what happens.