Teachers' Responses to Expectations About School Improvement: Empirical Findings From Switzerland

• In Event: Enacting Accountability in Education: Consequences for Teaching Professionalism and Practice

Abstract

Objectives and purposes

With the establishment of PBA policies that combine various types of data about educational quality to form a basis for school improvement (Verger et al., 2019), the demand for evidence-based practices in education has increased significantly. In Switzerland, a competency-based curriculum for primary schools in the German-speaking cantons was introduced in 2018–19 along with standardised tests that provide data on educational quality for cantonal authorities. At the same time, the external evaluation of schools and legal regulations remain strong policy instruments. One example is the regulation of formative assessment in a canton in Central Switzerland, Schwyz. This paper examines how school actors respond to new expectations by applying various data sources and aligning their practices with new legal requirements. Particular attention is directed towards how teacher teams negotiate and make sense of the various data sources to make decisions about classroom practices to improve student learning.

Theoretical perspectives

This paper draws on two theoretical perspectives. The governance perspective emphasises the interplay of various policy instruments, routines and rules in the school system or school organisation, while the enactment perspective helps identify priorities and conditions for local school actors to respond to new governing expectations to improve classroom practices (Ball, 2012). We also explore how the various data sources can be used to develop practices, such as bounded decision-making, leading to formal and informal learning across teacher teams in the school organisation (Cain et al., 2019).

Methods

Data gathering methods include interviews with school leaders and teachers in two primary schools located in Central Switzerland and observations of meetings over one school year where teacher teams plan and discuss teaching and learning activities, with a particular focus on adapting evidence-based practices of formative assessment formats combined with traditional summative assessments, as required by new cantonal regulations.

Data sources

Data sources include the transcripts from the conducted interviews, field notes from the observations, and key documents, such as school development plans and material developed by the teacher teams.

Results
Policy is often premised on the idea that access to evidence-based knowledge will lead to the use of this knowledge (Cain et al., 2019). The preliminary findings of this paper suggest that teachers’ use of data sources is often implicit as teachers integrate the various sources (i.e. student performance data, experience, research evidence, contextual information about students) in their decision-making. However, new regulations regarding assessment practices seem to shape teachers’ practices in somewhat instrumental ways.

Scientific/scholarly significance of the study

The paper shows how school actors’ respond to new expectations, particularly in terms of how they negotiate and make sense of data sources to improve classroom practices. Through the chosen design and methodological approaches, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of the interplay between performance-oriented and regulatory policy instruments and provides implications for teachers’ professionalism in a low-stakes accountability context.

Authors

• Vera Niederberger, Schwyz University of Teacher Education
  Presenting Author

• Guri Skedsmo, Schwyz University of Teacher Education
  Non-Presenting Author