Evaluation of teacher performance: move over hierarchy, here comes collegiality!

Abstract

There is a good deal of intrinsic appeal and widespread support for the notion of teacher evaluation for development and growth, as distinct from conformity, compliance and control. Phrases like ‘collaboration’, continuous learning cultures ‘'partnerships’, ‘collegiality’ and ‘teachers‐as‐learners’ roll easily off the lips, but we are beginning to discover that these supposedly more enlightened approaches have their own quite serious shortcomings. It is not that control perse disappears in the new democratic models of teacher evaluation. It is just that it is harder to locate in form and substance. This paper explores how the democratic genres of teacher evaluation are far from benign. An alternative is presented that moves beyond liberal/individualistic/progressive approaches, and instead positions teachers to not only ask questions about the technical competence of their teaching and the culture of professional relationships in their schools, but pushes them to question the nexus between schooling and society, and the reasons schools exist. This socially just approach is not as some might think, ‘off with the fairies’. Properly conceived and enacted, political approaches of this kind can be solidly and squarely located in the classroom: the challenge is to want to conceive of teaching in this way. The frontiers of control of teaching are shifting dramatically, and we need new and more robust paradigms with which to understand and change them.