Teacher evaluations – the great dinner table experiment

During my first year in teaching, my first evaluation revealed I wasn’t as terrible a teacher as I thought. My principal said: “I notice when I come into the room you go into performance mode. It makes learning so much fun but I am not sure if it is transferred to the kids though. Can they remember when you are not there?”?

She said if you create an experience that gets kids talking about it at the dinner table and that transfers to the parents who come back and say the kids tonight were floating and sinking bowling balls in the bathtub, then you have truly made an impact. Well, that was a huge call for me.

So I started creating activities and lessons that I knew kids would go home and do. Like making cans of soda float and sink and challenging mom and dad to identify whether the soft drink is diet or regular. Or bending a spoon (try that in a restaurant) or, my favorite, setting the table and then yanking the tablecloth from underneath!

Create experiences that truly translate back to the real world, as kids share their experiences at night at the dinner table.

Listen to my podcast about my first teacher evaluation

(File size is 0.9 MB) (Show length 3 minutes 40 seconds)