Day 3: teacher evaluation

Discuss one observation area that you would like to improve on for your teacher evaluation

   Today's prompt does not really inspire me. For a start, who is supposed to be evaluating me? The administration? With all due respect, but many of my superiors haven't taught a class for years, if at all, let alone a language class. Most don't even speak another foreign language. In the past, they have wandered in and out of my room, often unable to understand a word of what was said, and have given back some generalized feedback in the style of "your students seemed really engaged and interested" (Well I sure would hope so!). More often than not, there was no real feedback at all.
    Don't get me wrong, I do understand the situation they find themselves in. The day to day running of a school with all its demands from school boards, parents, students etc. must be exhausting and probably takes away any enthusiasm a principal or director may have to go and sit in a classroom where they don't understand a word. Anyway, they are always welcome to join me and my students in our linguistic adventures and I think they know that.
     In my opinion the only people who really should be evaluating me are my students. We spend a lot of time together and so if anyone knows what I am doing well and not so well, it's them. From time to time, they point things out to me, but this year, in the spirit of  the TEPES teacher evaluation system, we will all give out surveys to our students to see how we are doing as teachers. Honestly, this is the only evaluation that really matters to me.
     So while we are on the topic of improvement, one area I would really like to improve on is creating opportunities for all my students to practice their speaking skills. This is so hard to do, and the bigger the class, the harder it gets. In every language class there are oral presentations, debates and discussions, dialogue practices with a partner and at best one or two individual orals a year. All of these have their drawbacks. Presentations are often learned by heart, discussions and debates are great for extraverts who tend to dominate the conversation even though you try to give all students a chance. Partner work is seen by some students as an opportunity for a quick chat with their friends and individual orals take up so much class time.
     This is one of the areas where flipping the classroom for at least part of the lesson may be the solution. If I teach the students how to work on another one of their language skills individually, I could free up some time to practice conversation skills with a different group of kids each class. I experimented with this briefly at the end of last year and the students loved it. 
     Changing the students' mindset is the hardest part of the operation. Once they understand the expectations, have set their goals and see there are masses of interesting learning activities and opportunities available, they will hopefully notice that every single one of them will be getting more of my individual time and attention. And if it doesn't work, I will see it in their evaluation, and I'll try something else.