Teaching Evaluation That Matters: A Participatory Process for Growth and Development

Abstract

The purpose of the project was to address changes in a teacher evaluation system that has persisted as the grammar of schooling regarding evaluation for over a century (Cuban, 2013).The participatory action research (PAR) project in a South Asian international school helped a team of the principal and co-practitioners researchers (CPR=6) to implement and co-create an inquiry-based teacher evaluation process that supports teachers in improving their teaching practices and enhancing student engagement. They worked in a professional learning community that focused on peer observations, mutual feedback, and experiential learning that supported their growth as teachers. As a result, we co-designed a teacher growth and development support model for middle school teacher supervision and evaluation. Findings from three cycles of inquiry demonstrated that CPR team members and teachers’ perceptions and reflections about the evaluation system altered as they viewed teacher evaluation as ongoing support, time for reflection, and continuous professional development; they reported that the current practices for classroom observations were “tailor-made” to their individual needs as teachers. The TGDS, which now serves as the formal evaluation process at the middle school, is based on collecting formative evidence on teacher goals that provides teachers with regular, consistent, and feedback. As a result, their teaching practices and level of student engagement changed over the course of three inquiry cycles. The leadership style of the principal shifted to a more distributed leadership approach (Spillane et al., 2001) based on a moral authority (Sergiovanni & Starratt, 2006). Middle school teachers who are no longer anxious during classroom observations have demonstrated a re-informed sense of their roles as teachers in building a community that includes taking actions with students, themselves, and other teachers regarding the teacher evaluation system. While school districts may have designed the instrumentation for evaluation, the principal could use the processes of the CPR group and cycles of inquiry to better differentiate support for teachers.