Substitute Teachers Lounge
Substitute Teachers Lounge
Your Substitute Teacher Self Eval
How confident are you in selling a subject you're passionate about to someone who claims to hate it? If you're a substitute teacher, this might just be the challenge you have to face. In this episode, I put myself in the evaluator's shoes, posing hypothetical performance evaluation questions for you to consider, such as making history fun and interesting for a sixth grader who's already declared their dislike for the subject. Remember, if you don't believe in the subject, the student won't either.
We also tackle the crucial topic of treating all students equally in the classroom. Self-evaluation plays an essential role in ensuring that you don't show favoritism towards some students over others. Listen in as we discuss how to answer this question effectively during an evaluation and explore ways to guarantee equal treatment for all your students. Assess yourself and find out how well you did on your self-evaluation as we challenge you to reflect on your actions and create a better learning environment.
Chances are, as a substitute teacher, you never really have performance evaluations. I mean, after all, they don't like the job you're doing. They just won't ask you back to substitute teach again. Well, today I'm going to walk you through your annual evaluation, the questions that would probably be asked of you if you actually had an eval, a professional eval. This is Greg Collins Substitute Teacher's Lounge. All right, guys, i think our summer is fully here now. I doubt very many of you are substitute teaching, so you know we'll leave this summer to kind of improve ourselves. Performance evaluations. That's a perfect way to do that. Let me mention something before we get started.
Speaker 1:I'm trying something new with Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout is the host of my podcast and they've got a thing now called Co-host AI And I'm trying it. It's kind of interesting. It's using artificial intelligence, after it listens to my podcast, to both create a title and a description. Then it's going to give me a transcript, which I do all the time anyway, if you ever just want to read the podcast. But then it's also going to add something that I've never used before chapter markers. Now my podcast doesn't. I don't know. It doesn't equate to chapter markers, maybe as good as some others. Some have maybe four topics they're going to cover and it's clear when they change. Mine's not so much like that. But this artificial intelligence is going to break my podcast up. So as you're listening to it or, to be honest, hopefully, what I picture is you listen to it you realize about three quarters of a way through there's something you want to listen to again. Well, you can hit your tab button when you start the podcast and it will move to the next chapter marker. It's a way. Hopefully you're not doing it just because you're skipping part of the podcast. But you know, if that's what you do, that's what you do. So, trying that today, we'll see how it works out.
Speaker 1:1980, i was graduating college and they brought businesses by to conduct interviews. Now they were actually interviews for jobs. They were pretty much always sales related jobs and, let's face it, every company you've ever run into sales related jobs, most of them will take anybody and try them out in sales, and that's what this was for. Even our counselors at the college said why don't you go by? don't go by, do one of these interviews and it will give you some good practice when you actually interview in your field And perhaps maybe you discover that you're a better sales person than you thought. So I thought I'd try one.
Speaker 1:Now, this isn't so much a performance evaluation question as it is an interview question, but I thought it would be a good way to start. Okay, first question when I sat down I had my you know, i'm a college kid but I had to put on. I put on my jacket, my tie, my button up shirt, my collar I'm sure the collar was a button down collar was really trying to present myself well to this person. So the first question out of their mouth they looked at me, they looked at my tie and they said sell me your tie. Now, think about that for a moment.
Speaker 1:His point was, the interviewer's point was let's see how well you can sell anything. And I actually did pretty well. As you know, i have a gift to Gab and I actually did pretty well. They would have actually hired me for a job, not just based on that tie story, but based on the way I could react when I was put in a situation. They went on to ask me how well could you sell this product if you knew the customer really didn't need it? Now, think about that. That is some kind of sales job there, right? I don't know if I want to keep you in suspense. They were actually looking for someone that is not a ruthless salesperson, but someone. If the person really even though there's an upsell just about every time there's a sales project, well, you're not going to sell a $500,000 home to somebody that can only forward $150,000 home. It just doesn't make sense, and I talked a little bit to that regard.
Speaker 1:Now let's think about that first question selling my tie. When it comes to the classroom comes to maybe a performance evaluation that a principal would ask you. Let's see how you would answer this question. That's similar to sell me your tie. Keep in mind, by the way, this makes it a classroom situation. When he told me to sell me his tie or to sell him my tie, his point was sell me something that I really didn't know I wanted. So let's think about that in the classroom. Now What if the principal asked you sets you down for a performance evaluation and said you're sitting in front of a sixth grader for the first time, mr Collins, and that sixth grader has already told you that he hates history. Sell him on how he should approach history, or, in other words, what can you do to change his mind and make him think about history, make him think that history is actually going to be beneficial to him. All right, so think about that question for a moment and put it in your perspective. I would challenge you. Our first challenge, perhaps, is maybe even selling ourself on it, because if we don't believe in history in this case?
Speaker 1:I'm a math person. I think I know how to make math fun and interesting. Not so much with history, although my wife would be just the opposite. She's excellent at teaching history and sometimes she'll ask me for help with math as I ask her for help with history. So everybody's a little bit better at certain subjects. But yet the principal asked you how would you share this subject with a student that you know didn't really want to learn it? So there you are, your performance eval. The principal wants you to picture maybe him as a sixth grader who doesn't like history, and you're a substitute teacher who's trying to make that more interesting. What would you do? Well, you don't want to be hulky about it. What the principal is really trying to get across is how do I know you're not just going to go in there and sit around and that you could care less about what you're teaching this child Boy? that's a pretty good question, isn't it? Well, maybe you answer it something like this you're going to have your own answer. If the principal asked me this question, here's what I would say. I would say, johnny, i can relate to that a little bit.
Speaker 1:History is not my favorite subject. I actually think it's very interesting in some regard. But you give me a math class and that's my favorite topic. What's your favorite topic? Maybe the student will tell you and then you'll say well, think about what makes you love math and relate it to history.
Speaker 1:History can be fun. You wonder why you have to learn certain things, but it's important to learn those things in order to know about the history of our country. History can be fun too. A lot of the shows that are on the History Channel, for instance, tells you not only the history of the country but how, maybe after the wars, how the guys that were really good with steel and things like that built our big buildings. How people that were really good on the farm gave us improved things to eat. Chocolate used to be expensive, and now it's not because of what her she did. All that has to do with history. So if you think about your most exciting subject, it's not history You just told me that But history can be just as fun and you can make it just as fun.
Speaker 1:So all of your projects this year in your history class, approach it from a fun standpoint and enjoyable standpoint, and don't just go in there thinking that you're going to hate it So I'm not going to do it. All, right Now, how do I do? How would you do if you answer that question? Now, here's what I tried to do for this episode. I tried not to take any notes. I tried to just jot down some of the possible questions I would ask and then I kind of took my finger down the list on my phone and picked one. That's the one I picked And that is a spontaneous answer. I didn't have any notes. I was making it up as I go because that's what's going to happen in a performance evaluation. You're going to have to make things up as you go, but what you can do is anticipate right now. Think about if you're putting that situation or better yet, you forget about being asked a question like that by a principal and a performance evaluation. You should always go into your classroom. All right, how am I going to make this topic interesting today?
Speaker 1:First step, obviously, is to make sure the students know that I'm interested in it or they have. They're not going to be interested in it. If they can tell, i could care less whether I'm in there or not. So that's a good strong. I've spent 11 minutes on it. Now. That's a good strong question, one that you could be asked in a performance evaluation.
Speaker 1:Next question Suzie is one of your best students in class, but you can tell something is bothering Suzie. Do you ignore it Or do you ask her about it? Ooh, that might be a tough one. How would you answer that question? I'm going to answer it for me, because there's plenty of people out there that will say it's none of my business. I will try, maybe, to go out of my way and help Suzie when I can tell that the thing bothering her is affecting her work, and that is totally a good approach.
Speaker 1:That's not necessarily the approach I've always taken. I have walked up to students and say Suzie, you smile all the time. You don't have that chipper. Look on your face. Let me know if there's anything I can do for you. I don't want to. I don't have to know what's going on, but if you need to talk to me ever, feel free that you can do that, and then I think that puts the student at ease and maybe they're more receptive in the class when it comes their turn to come to the class that you're substituting for. So that's the approach I've always taken. That is the approach that I would answer a performance evaluation question like that from the principal. Then possibly I'm not even going to say possibly, i'm going to say the hardest question that the principal may ask you. He may say she may say All right.
Speaker 1:Mr Collins, i'm sure you realize that the students in your class come from different levels of financial income. They come from different ethnicities, they come from different political views, possibly based on what they've heard their parents say. Your students can be vastly different in your classroom. How do you approach each one to make sure you're being fair to all, especially students who perhaps it's obvious that the way they feel on certain topics is not the way you feel about that person? Man, that's a loaded question right there. You could go off in a hundred different ways. We see students all the time. We can tell sometimes just about the way they walk down the hallway, maybe who they're holding hands with, the type of student. That may be different than how you would act if you were a student in the classroom, but yet are we there to evaluate What that student thinks on their own personal time, or are we there to teach them a subject? Well, obviously we are there just to teach them a subject.
Speaker 1:What the principle when they ask you that question is trying to say to you what do you do to make sure you treat all students equally? Now I would personally tell them the story of how I had another teacher, a friend of mine, who made the comment that no matter how hard you tried, you don't treat all students equally. Maybe that's true, but I did hand out a poll one time and 90% of the kids did say that they thought I treated everyone equally. So I do try to do that. Some of them said they thought I treated the volleyball players better than everybody else, or maybe they mentioned a specific student in the classroom because that was their opinion. But the goal is to answer that question in a way so that you show the principle that you treat all the students equally.
Speaker 1:Now what you need to do personally, regardless of how you answer that question is do a serious evaluation of yourself. Think right now, think all summer, look back to this past year and think about times that if you had to do it over, maybe you wouldn't have treated a certain student a certain way. Maybe because of I don't know any of those things that we mentioned when this question started, do you look at that student differently? Are there any situations where, as soon as students walk in the room, or you see them in the hallway doing something and then they walk in the room, do you already think differently about them than you did before that happened? If you do, you may subconsciously, or maybe even consciously, treat students differently because of what you saw, because of what you see when they come in the classroom.
Speaker 1:Well, i would challenge you to do this Always treat students equally. Make sure that you don't about the only time I show favoritism to students. I show it in this regard. If they get their work finished first and they volunteer to help with other students, i let them do that. Now, obviously, i'm giving them a unique type of treatment that actually shows the other students that this student got their work finished first.
Speaker 1:Well, i think that's okay, but if it's obvious, i just show all my time to a certain student, to a certain group of students, and I don't give any attention to the others. That's what we really need to work on. So forget about what you've seen that student doing, what they I don't know I hate to use the word look like, but the way they carry themselves when they walk in the classroom. Work this summer on how you can treat all students equally and therefore do a good job substitute teaching all of them. Now, how did you do? How did you do on your evaluation? Did you pass? And if you didn't, this summer you know exactly what you need to work on.
