Reconsidering the dual purposes of teacher evaluation

ABSTRACT

While countries differ in their approach to and context of teacher evaluation, many have one thing in common—they hope it serves its formative and summative purposes. In this article, the author asks policymakers, educators and researchers to reconsider how these dual purposes are accomplished. Current approaches and research both in and outside of the U.S. tend to focus on evaluator delivery of feedback, rather than teacher learning. The author examines the origin of formative and summative in the U.S. (since it influences thinking internationally), argues that it may be time to rethink beliefs about the role of principal in feedback delivery and improvement, and identifies strategies that promise to improve teaching practice, e.g., formative assessment, National Board Certification, professional development, coaching, professional learning communities, mentoring, and teacher advice networks. It may be time to think about a system of improvement that is complementary to teacher evaluation and supports teacher learning. This article is a reponse to Flores and Derrington’s 2018 call to join the conversation about the contradictory purpose of accountability and improvement in their special issue 3.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher evaluation
• formative
• summative
• principal feedback
• teacher improvement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. According to Sorensen (2016), while value-added measurement or modelling (VAM) has been used extensively in the U.S. and England, other countries have exercised far more caution and scepticism towards it. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; 2013a) reports that the Slovak Republic, Mexico, Chile, Scotland and Singapore use student results for some purpose in teacher appraisal. OECD characterises the use of student learning outcomes as ‘an appealing measure…since the ultimate goal of teaching is to improve student learning’ (p. 35).

2. Principal will be used herein to mean headmaster, school director, leader, and head teacher and teacher evaluation or evaluation will be used to mean teacher appraisal. When ‘we’ is used, it refers to the collective educational community of scholars, policymakers and practitioners within the U.S. and abroad.

3. Promising strategies, according to Darling-Hammond et al. (2009), are ones that have some evidence of impact but ‘are not yet confirmed by a solid body of evidence, and the jury remains out as to their effectiveness or conditions under which they are most likely to be effective’ (p. 12).

4. Donaldson (2021) has done a comprehensive summary of U.S. research on teacher evaluation in general and Tuytens et al. (2020) has a review of international empirical studies. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; 2013a) may be the most recent international summary of teacher evaluation among countries. Because of the commonality of observation, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2021) has begun to focus on cultural differences in teaching across countries. For a special issue in this journal see, Flores and Derrington (2018).

5. While there may be some schools where principals can and do focus on instructional leadership (e.g., Tuytens & Devos, 2017), it may be where principals are in high-performing schools (e.g., Brandon et al., 2018) and where conditions complement teacher learning, e.g., prioritising the formative purpose, positive relationships, incentives, supplementary funds, and knowledge of good teaching (Maslow & Kelley, 2012; Reinhorn et al., 2017).

6. Context factors include: evaluation policy and its ‘stakes,’ working conditions, relationships, the rating received, and feedback usefulness, to name a few (Tuytens et al., 2020).

7. Scriven believed that evaluation should be useful to teachers. If not, it was simply data collected for the organisation (Stufflebeam, 2013). Instead, instrument design and training emphasise principal accuracy (Hazi, 2022). Only recently have researchers focused on usefulness (e.g., Donaldson, 2021).

8. Another complication is the instrument that has its own theory of instruction that may clash with teachers’ own theories of practice. It is composed of generic teaching behaviours; judged out of context and devoid of information about the lesson’s context. Only a few items deal with in-classroom, observable behaviours on most teacher evaluation instruments. Scriven (1967) also advocated for the inclusion of particularised duties that are unique to their job (Hazi, 2022).

9. In contrast to assessment for learning is assessment of learning that is the use of standardised testing. Since 2002 and No Child Left Behind, data use in the U.S. has ‘inspired fear and mistrust in education circles [and has been] … weaponized’ against teachers (Henig, 2021, para 1) resulting in resistance. In fact, there is no evidence that analysing data from state and interim assessments is effective in raising student test scores (Hill, 2020a). ‘Teachers believe that data dehumanizes the students they work so hard to support, the data exposes something stakeholders aren’t ready to hear, or they believe that their district’s circumstances are unique, so comparative data isn’t relevant’ (Curry, 2021, para 3).

10. Kennedy (2019) characterises 3 types of professional development as focusing on: teaching practice, i.e., what teachers do, often as generic practices with little regard for their purpose; content knowledge; and strategies, i.e., teaching as a process of continuous decision making that responds to events unfolding in the classroom and how students think about the content.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Helen M. Hazi

Helen M. Hazi is a Professor Emerita of Educational Leadership at West Virginia University. She has been a teacher, a Supervisor of Curriculum and Instruction, and an expert witness. She writes about issues that have consequence for teacher evaluation and instructional supervision in books and journals such as the Journal of Curriculum & Supervision, the Journal of Educational Supervision, and Educational Policy Analysis Archives. Current issues in teacher evaluation include: instructional improvement and its commodification, judgment, and the trouble with feedback.