How To Use Marzano To Get A Great Evaluation

One of the things I have come to love about Marzano aligned teaching and planning is that as I have gotten more and more comfortable with it, my students have gotten better and better at assessments and I have gotten better and better evaluations.  This blog post will give you some tips and tricks to get a good evaluation using Marzano!

To get a great evaluation, it's a really good idea to begin by understanding the tool your evaluator will be rating you with (see, that's Marzano right there - identify your learning targets and rate your progress toward them!).  It's like knowing the strike zone in baseball. 

If your school is a "Marzano school" it is probably using the teacher evaluation tool created by Marzano.  If not, effectively using Marzano strategies will still help you get better evaluations because you will be using best practices and creating great lesson plans when you go through the steps I laid out in a previous post called Lesson Planning With Marzano.

If you are a "Marzano school" that uses the Marzano evaluation tool, this is where things start to get really easy!

• The tool is sort of a checklist of domains and strategies that evaluators simply check off and comment on, so, just be sure you clearly label which strategies you will be using in your lesson and either give your evaluator a copy or briefly speak with them beforehand.
  • This does a couple of things for you.  First, it communicates to your evaluator that you're prepared.  Second, it gives you a better chance of getting a score on the elements you want to get a score on.
• As you are teaching, especially if you do this with your students anyway, you might want to call out or have labeled on projected Google Slides the name or number of the elements you are using.  This serves the same purposes as the first step.
• Make sure you show you are monitoring the strategies you use for their desired effect.  When I overtly started doing this throughout instruction rather than just at the end during evaluations, my scores really started to soar.
• Lastly, after the observation, when it is time to meet with your administrator, be ready to explain not just which strategies you chose, but why you chose them and how you determined if they were effective or not.
  • Doing this cements in your evaluator's mind that you are a very reflective, knowledgeable teacher and will usually get you the benefit of the doubt and bump up your scores in certain areas they were not planning to.
    

The thing an evaluator wants to see more than anything is that you know what you are doing, why you are doing it and that your students are learning and engaged.  Using the strategies on the Marzano placemat ensure that you are using best practices and highlighting those practices should ensure a very positive evaluation!