evaluating and rewarding teachers the prospects of the valorizza experiment rev
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Evaluating and rewarding teachers – the prospects of the Valorizza experiment
Dirk Van DammeHead of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation - OECD
Introductory comments
• Improving teacher quality is the most successful route to building high-quality education systems– Attracting and retaining good teachers– Supporting the professionalisation of
teachers– Motivating teachers– Involving teachers in educational reform
• Evaluation, appraisal and feedback are key features of professionalisation
• Their ultimate function is to create a knowledge-rich environment for teachers 2
Introductory comments
• Evaluation of teachers serves many purposes– Rewarding excellence in the profession– Stimulating improvement– Supporting professional standards of
excellence– Demonstrating public accountability– Identifying underperforming teachers– Fostering professional development,
coaching, effective supervision and collegial intervision
• All leading, of course, to improved student learning and achievement
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Insights from TALIS 2008
• Most teachers welcome evaluation, appraisal and feedback and would like to receive more
• Too many teachers still do not receive adequate appraisal and feedback
• Evaluation and appraisal too often do not lead to effective consequences
• Teachers receiving feedback generally feel more effective, have greater job satisfaction and engage in professional improvement activities
• School leaders are not investing enough in adequate appraisal
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Insights from TALIS 2008
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Designing effective teacher evaluation
• Critical conditions for teacher evaluation to be effective– Needs to be in line with other policies
sustaining their professionalisation:• recruitment, selection, training, induction,
professional development, remuneration, incentives, …
– Balancing improvement and accountability– Needs to be seen by teachers as fair, firmly
based in the profession, evidence-based
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Designing effective teacher evaluation
• Possible methods and sources of evidence:– Classroom observation– Objective setting and individual interviews– Self-evaluation– Teacher portfolio– Standardised forms to record performance– Teacher testing– Surveys of students and parents– Use of student achievement data
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Designing effective teacher evaluation
• Evaluators– Need to be perceived as competent,
trustworthy– Preferably should have a training in
evaluation• External use of evaluation results:
– Rewarding excellence– Career advancement– Sanctions for poorly performing teachers
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The Valorizza experiment
• The Valorizza experiment is a most valuable contribution to the international experience in teacher evaluation– Following established good practice– Introducing some original elements– Sometimes also departing from the
mainstream practice• The use of ‘reputation’ as evidence• Relying on peer judgment rather than
extensive documented evidence• School-based rather than standards based
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Reputation
• In educational evaluation reputation is a contested concept– Still widely used, for example in university
rankings• Two contrasting views
– Reputation measurement ultimately is not much more than a ‘popularity poll’
– Peers, supervisors and parents have a fairly accurate view of the actual quality of teachers and reputation thus is a trustworthy proxy for quality
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Reputation
• Convergence of reputation indicators across different communities is a key validity measure
• Time factor in reputation is important– Building a high reputation takes time– Losing a reputation can go fast– Time-lag in reputation should not work
against innovative teachers
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Peer judgment
• Evaluation of professional practice should always be based on the principle of ‘peer review’ and should be as much as possible ‘evidence-based’– The evidence collected should not
automatically lead to a judgment but is mediated by the review by peers
– Evaluation can never be completely ‘objective’, but involves ‘inter-subjective’ judgment by well-informed peers
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Peer judgment
– Evaluation should be evidence-based but should not necessarily involve huge amounts of data; keep it practical and as simple as possible
– In complex and information-rich environments a judgment inevitably reduces the complexity to essentially very simple decisions
– The evaluators making the judgment should be trusted as competent to do so
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School-based
• In contrast to many teacher evaluation schemes, the Valorizza experiment is very much school-based– Other systems prefer standards-based
assessment where every teacher is evaluated on equal grounds against general standards
– A school-based approach has many merits though• Strengthening the school as a professional
community of practice• Taking into account the specific contextual
conditions in which teachers have to perform
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School-based
• Still, it would make sense to try to link the teacher evaluation more explicitly to agreed standards of excellence in professional practice, while still allowing variation to conform to school specificities and local contexts
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Conclusion• The Valorizza experiment definitely is a very
interesting new development and deserves a second round
• Its main contributions are situated in– The methodological sound use of reputation– The judgment by peers based on a cross-
community evidence base– Its school-based design
• It could improve on– The use of professional standards as
reference of good practice – The feedback to teachers– A need to take into consideration the relation
between teacher evaluation and innovation. 16
