School Leaders and Teacher Evaluation: Trapped Between Accountability and Professional Learning?

• In Event: 51.055 - Intelligent Accountability: An Evidence-Based, Trustworthy, and Persuasive Alternative to the Status Quo

Abstract

Purpose: The strong focus on teachers and teaching, combined with accountability reforms, has ignited policy-makers' interest in teacher evaluation as a device to improve students' learning outcome. The paper addresses the paradox that school leaders are identified as the obvious evaluators, but many lack the time, competence or skills to give teachers formative feedback.

Perspectives: The paper questions the twofold purpose of teacher evaluation: to serve as a quality assurance mechanism and promote professional development (Popham, 1988; Papay, 2012) and asks why teacher evaluation systems rarely serve either aim (Kraft & Gilmour, 2013) apparently trapped between the summative and formative ambition. Explanations such as a ‘hidden contract’ between teachers and school leaders (Berg, 2003) are applied; the prominence of bureaucracy (Mehta, 2013), testing for accountability (Smith, 2014), teacher resistance (Ozga & Lawn, 2017) the staying power between autonomy and accountability (Glatter, 2012) or, as this paper asks, institutionalized stubbornness due to history, tradition and organizational structures. When analyzing educational institutions as loosely coupled, Weick (1976) found that teachers were responsible for pupils, curriculum and parents; while leaders administered their work. Mehta, (2013) argues that school leaders have developed into professional administrators. Intelligent accountability necessitates addressing this managerial drift and ask how school leaders position themselves in relation to the teaching profession. Professions build their leaders from within, through a system of specialization and qualification, and future school leaders must know how to lead knowledge processes.

Data source and mode of inquiry: Fifteen studies published between 2013 and 2018, with data from more than 150 schools, 400 school leaders and 3000 teachers that describe how school leaders contribute to teacher evaluation were analyzed in NVivo, and six categories identified: 1) Leader behavior, 2) Professional learning, 3) Relations between school leaders and teachers, 4) Training of school leaders, 5) The use of evaluation results, 6) Implementation.

Results
School leaders are expected to mediate between political goals, summative, abstract information and teachers' classroom practice. To improve practice, teachers need Intelligible, actionable knowledge. The analysis of studies reveals that some school leaders distance themselves from the classroom, rarely engage in dialogues with teachers, and identify with the administration. Teachers feel that these school leaders don't trust them. Other school leaders try to give teachers formative feedback and identify with the profession, but experience teacher evaluation as a job on top of everything else, and treat it as an administrative duty, not a professional learning opportunity.

Scholarly significance and impact
Within the group of school leaders, different understandings of the purpose of teacher evaluation were identified. Some leaders hide behind summative information, others try to use it formatively, but lack time and competence. The conclusion is that well-structured professional learning communities have the potential to develop alternatives to current accountability practices. These communities, however, need leadership and must be integrated in an educational infrastructure. Through systematic work from within the profession, abstract knowledge can be replaced with intelligible, actionable knowledge and a more intelligent accountability system reclaiming ownership and trust (O'Neill, 2013) can be developed.

Authors

• Sølvi Lillejord, University of Bergen

• Kristin Børte, The Norwegian Knowledge Centre for Education