Teachers "Talk Back": Exploring the Dynamics Between Practice and Value-Added Evaluation Policy

• In Event: 77.035 - Balancing Doing Well and Feeling Well: Educator Anxiety and Responses to Evaluations

Abstract

Value-added teacher evaluation policies have resulted in undesirable responses among many teachers. Research has shed little light on how implementation of these policies effects teachers’ choices of practice. The study draws from inhabited institutionalism and sensemaking research to investigate how teachers choose their practices in response to value-added teacher evaluation policy. In-depth, narrative interviews of teachers (n=19) across a single school district were documented to construct a theoretical model that relates how macro-level conditions, school-level contexts and teachers’ personal histories interact to influence teachers’ choices of practice. The findings suggest that teachers’ and administrators’ practices shape the policy implementation process and that value-added evaluation policy creates a tension between cultural ideologies of accountability and teachers’ lived experiences of vulnerability.

Author

• Emily Astor, Blount County Schools