Teacher Appraisal Observed

G. Haynes, Felicity Wikely, E. C. Wragg, Prof E C Wragg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134800698
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Systems for the appraisal of teachers have been in place since 1992, bringing with them considerable controversy. How effective are they? What does this mean for the classroom teacher? This major new study, led by Ted Wragg, uses as its basis information gathered from all 109 Local Education authorities, 658 primary and secondary teachers and 479 appraisers. Teacher appraisal is examined from the perspectives of all those concerned and at all levels. The main focus of the study is on teacher competence in the classroom, which lies at the heart of school effectiveness and improving pupils' achievement. Through the use of a variety of methods including intensive case studies, the book provides a unique insight into the quality of classroom practice and teacher appraisal today, what it means for those involved and how to use this knowledge to move on from this point.

Chapter 1
The appraisal of teaching

Teaching is not a single skill. Whereas in some jobs the same routine is repeated over and over, making it relatively easy to do and even easier to evaluate, teaching combines knowledge, numerous skills of management and communication, relationships, the manifestation of personal traits, values and attitudes, and intricate patterns of behaviour. Teaching is not a simple matter either to carry out or to appraise.

Consider an incident which was observed during a research project (Wragg 1993). A teacher, attempting to explain insects to eight and nine year old children, accepted ‘spider’, ‘ladybird’, ‘worm’ and ‘snail’ as responses to a question asking for examples of the genre. Only one of these, the ladybird, is actually an insect. During and after the lesson the children appeared confused, and most obtained low scores on a test in which they were asked to identify insects. On the surface this is a simple event to appraise: the teacher was incompetent, since he did not know himself what an insect was. As a result the children were confused and appeared to learn little or nothing.

Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that this is not the end of the matter. If this event had occurred during a lesson in which the teacher was being appraised, what might the aftermath have been? Should the appraiser have simply awarded a low grade, on the grounds that the teacher was not competent? Would the giving of a grade achieve anything? Can we be sure that lack of subject knowledge is the problem, for at one stage in the same lesson, when a child mentioned that a spider was an insect, the teacher replied, ‘OK, you think of a spider. You keep the spider there’. He never revisited the matter. Could this mean that his own subject knowledge was not the central issue, but rather that his failure to return to the point and give children feedback about their answers might have confused them?

What is clear from this example alone is that the observation and appraisal of teaching, and indeed of pupil learning as well, raises many issues. These include, among others, the nature of professional competence, the purposes and intentions of teachers, what children learn or fail to learn, the strategies teachers employ, methods of observing and recording what happens in lessons, the content and style of discussion after teaching has been observed, the roles of teacher and appraiser, and what needs to happen following an appraisal to ensure that teachers and ultimately pupils benefit from the whole exercise.

APPRAISAL AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Formal systems of teacher appraisal must to some extent be seen as part of a general push for accountability. In any activity involving the expenditure of large sums of private or public money, the sponsors are likely to ask for an account to be rendered, especially if financial resources are tight. Education costs billions of pounds, and even though teachers may not always be as well paid as they deserve, salaries do constitute a significant proportion of that expenditure. Furthermore, at a time when millions of jobs have disappeared, in most cases never to return in their previous form, parents recognise that the more highly educated in society have a better chance of obtaining employment than those who leave school with few or no formal qualifications. Hence the increasing pressure on schools since the 1970s, and especially during the 1980s and 1990s, to achieve as much as possible during the compulsory years of education.

Accountability can operate at several levels, at both micro- and macro-level. Elliott et al. (1982) argue that teachers feel most accountable at a local level, to their pupils, fellow teachers and children’s parents. To those wider constituencies, such as governors, committees and local authorities, accountability may be seen as more remote and thus more legal and formal in nature. Appraisal straddles these levels, since it is legally required, but conducted at individual school level. Many teachers probably see the head as the person to whom they are most accountable.

There has been increasing emphasis on financial aspects of education, so it is not surprising that the language of accountancy is not far from discussions about effectiveness. Thus terms like ‘cost effective’ or ‘performance indicators’, which sometimes do not fit well with the traditionally held view of teaching as an art suffused with a certain amount of mystique, are increasingly heard during discussions about education. There are millions of pupils and hundreds of thousands of teachers, so it is tempting to think entirely in terms of quantities: whether the teacher is in the top few per cent, obtains high marks from raters, or achieves high test scores from pupils. Quantitative aspects do have a part to play, but there is a very strong qualitative dimension to be considered.

Teachers are now compared, unfairly perhaps, with the finest communicators in the world. A lesson in a primary school on insects may be judged in the eyes of the pupils alongside television programmes presented by outstanding broadcasters and film makers, who have access to brilliantly and expensively filmed vignettes of insect life provided by a galaxy of photographers and naturalists from all over the globe. The jobbing teacher with a few worksheets, wallcharts, filmstrips and dehydrated butterflies can easily look pedestrian in comparison with the glossy images of the high-budget television series.

The definition and application of appraisal will depend on individuals’ own attitudes and values. Those who believe teaching to be a refuge for life’s incompetents will see it as a way of smoking out the indolent and incapable. Many who actually work in education will regard it as part of a continuous process for the improvement and extension of professional skills. Such a view sees any act of appraisal as an interim measure, both retrospective and prospective, looking back at what has or has not been achieved, taking stock of the present, and then planning some pathway that will help the teacher develop further in the future. It can be part of the development of what Wragg (1994) called the ‘dynamic practitioner’ in the ‘dynamic school’.

The concept of appraisal, in theory a self-evident, neutral notion, can acquire overtones of retribution or support, depending on the individual’s vantage point. Someone with a strong financial perspective would see it as a value-for-money exercise, addressing the question, ‘Is whatever teacher X does a better investment of money than, say, buying new pieces of the most modern information technology, books, ancillary helpers, videos, and all the other things a teacher’s salary might purchase?’ This view frequently encompasses a comparative dimension, seeking to compare teachers with each other to discover who should be promoted or paid a financial bonus.

One term commonly used, especially in industry, is ‘performance appraisal’. The word ‘performance’ can be widely stretched. It carries with it both commercial associations of products and profits, and theatrical notions of someone centre stage enacting a scene before an audience. There is some reluctance amongst teachers to being perceived either as an intermediary in a simple input—output industrial model, or as someone obliged to dominate the classroom when under observation because of pressure to ‘perform’. A few years ago there was often embarrassment in initial teacher training when external examiners with a secondary school background, mistakenly turned loose to watch primary student teachers, subsequently announced that they were unable to judge what they had seen because the teacher had not ‘performed’.

None the less, there is some value in looking at the purposes of appraisal in industry and commerce, and Whyte (1986) has written a full review of assessment objectives and procedures in these fields. One principal purpose commonly reported in commercial firms is the linking of monetary rewards and job performance, a controversial issue in teaching. Other arguments often advanced include: facilitating the more effective use of human and material resources, identifying candidates for promotion to higher responsibility, improving individuals’ motivation, dismissing or demoting the incompetent, rationalising and redeploying employees, and, though this is rarely stated in explicit form, exercising control over staff. All of these are possibilities in the field of teacher appraisal, though some have been embraced more eagerly than others.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF APPRAISAL

There is nothing new about analysing the nature and effect of teaching. In various classical civilisations this was done by some of the best known teachers, who often fashioned a unique philosophy from reflections on their own observation and analysis of teaching. In ancient China, Confucius wrote in his Analects:

If out of the four corners of a subject I have dealt thoroughly with one corner and the pupils cannot then find out the other three for themselves, then I do not explain any more.

Socrates was one of many Greek figures to scrutinise teaching, emphasising the importance of questioning and encouraging learners to think for themselves, while in Roman times Cicero and Quintilian analysed teaching methodology in considerable detail, and their analyses of, for example, what they judged to be successful lecturing, were very influential. In some mediaeval universities students who could demonstrate their teaching skill publicly might be accepted as members of a teachers’ guild and given an early form of teaching qualification. Paris University students in the thirteenth century who could successfully argue a case before a panel of examiners would be granted the chancellor’s licence to teach, and in Bologna candidates for a bachelor’s degree had to have been adjudged competent to teach on the basis of lectures given to other students, in order to earn their degree.

In modern times the debate about passing judgement on teaching has been much more intricate and involved. The arguments about what constitutes effectiveness are described in the following section, but in a pluralist society there is not just one sole form of teaching which is regarded as ‘effective’. Politicians sometimes have a simpler, more unclouded view of appraisal. The evolution of appraisal in England has been well documented by Hazlewood (1994), who studied its impact on the middle management of secondary schools.

The period before the Education Act 1986, which made appraisal a legal requirement, was dominated by a speech made by the Secretary of State at the time, Sir Keith (later Lord) Joseph, at the North of England conference in January 1984, when he said that appraisal was the means to ‘remove unsatisfactory teachers from a profession where they can do much harm’. The aftershock of this widely reported statement, rapidly picked up by teacher unions, some of which threatened to boycott appraisal for nearly a decade thereafter, was so fierce that he mitigated what he said in later speeches, stating, at a conference in Chester in January 1985:

To be fully effective an appraisal system would have to be complemented by better arrangements for the individual teacher’s career development, including induction, in-service training…. [It is not the case that] I am only concerned with the need to dismiss the very small number of incompetent teachers who cannot be restored to adequate effectiveness…. I am concerned with the whole range of positive advantages that would flow from applying to the teaching force standards of management which have become common elsewhere.

In February 1985, the Permanent Secretary at the Department of Education and Science (DES) picked up the proposition that the DES wished to ‘apply to the teaching force standards of management which have become common elsewhere’. He said he wanted soundly based decisions on such matters as staff deployment, in-service training, promotion and career development, as well as a framework for helping schools and colleges to improve standards, set goals and identify ways in which staff could achieve these communal goals (Hancock 1985).

It was the Education (No. 2). Act 1986 that made appraisal a legal requirement, and the Education (School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions of Employment) Order 1987 that charged head teachers with ‘supervising and participating in any arrangements within an agreed national framework, for the appraisal of performance of teachers who teach in the school’. Pilot projects were then set up in three urban and three rural local authorities, namely Croydon, Newcastle and Salford, and Cumbria, Somerset and Suffolk respectively. The county of Suffolk had already taken a lead in pioneering the introduction of appraisal (Suffolk Education Department 1985, 1987).

The next phase of evolution was strongly influenced by political issues. Despite a further assurance from the Minister of State, Angela Rumbold, in an address to the Industrial Society in February 1987 that sacking poor teachers was ‘no longer in anyone’s mind’, two of the largest teaching unions, the National Union of Teachers and the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers, refused to serve on the National Steering Group of the six LEA pilot projects for the whole of 1987, largely because a pay settlement had been imposed on the teaching profession. In the following year the Education Act 1988 began to dominate the attention of teachers and their representatives, as well as politicians.

The two Secretaries of State who were in office between 1989 and 1992 did not stay long. The first, John MacGregor, made a pragmatic decision that the introduction of the National Curriculum established by the Education Act 1988 should be the Government’s highest priority. In a 1989 speech to the Secondary Heads’ Association MacGregor had spoken positively of the potential that teacher appraisal had ‘to strengthen and develop the quality of both teaching and of management in schools in ways that will lead to better education for pupils’. In September 1990, however, he decided that it should be voluntary.

His successor, Kenneth Clarke, came under attack from opposition parties for the delay, so in December 1990, he countermanded MacGregor’s decision in a letter to local education authorities, stating that ‘Regular appraisal will help to develop the professionalism of teachers and so improve the education of their pupils’. The Education (School Teacher Appraisal) Regulations 1991 embodied the law and the DES Circular 12/91 offered advice about how the exercise should be conducted.

In the same year alterations were made to the Teachers’ Pay and Conditions of Service document so that heads were compelled to introduce appraisal and teachers were obliged to participate. Every teacher working for more than 0.4 of a full-time post had to be appraised between 1992 and 1994; the head teacher was responsible for appointing the appraiser; targets were to be set; the appraiser should, where possible, have management responsibility for the teacher concerned; there would also be observation of classroom teaching lasting an hour or more, with at least two observation periods.

In the wake of all the political arguments, the pressures from the introduction of the National Curriculum and other changes, and the repeated threats of boycott from some teacher unions (one union leader, Nigel de Gruchy of the NASUWT, asserting that ‘professionalism amongst teachers runs the risk of being crushed once and for all’), appraisal was introduced in minimalist form. There was no national proforma, nor were grades awarded. Dismissal and promotion were not accorded a high profile, though the regulations did state that appraisal information ‘may be taken into account…[in] the promotion, dismissal or discipline of school teachers’ or in ‘the use of any discretion in relation to pay’. Some latitude was, therefore, left to local interpretations of the regulations. Appraisal had become a legal requirement for the first time in England, and the various interpretations of the framework were amongst issues we wished to explore in the Leverhulme Appraisal Project.

‘EFFECTIVENESS’ AND TEACHING

One assumption made by some advocates of appraisal is that what is ‘effective’ in teaching is uncontroversial and universal, that we can recognise it when we see it, or obversely, that we can identify ineffective teaching and take steps to make it more effective. At an individual level this is probably true, in that people do hold personal views about teaching and may defend them quite persuasively. However, the consensus which was thought to obtain in the nineteenth century, when training institutions were called ‘Normal Schools’ on the grounds that there was some commonly agreed ‘norm’ of good teaching, no longer exists. Pluralism in our society is illustrated by the many debates about so-called traditional and progressive teaching styles, teaching sign language to deaf children, the various methods of teaching reading, the systematic teaching of grammar in English lessons, the use of a predominantly oral approach in foreign language teaching and other classroom issues. In a pluralist society like our own, no single stereotype is supreme.

There is also the pressing question about what exactly is meant by the term ‘effective’. For some it is strictly about what children learn, so the more factual knowledge they absorb, the more effective the teacher. Others would argue that incremental gains in pupils’ learning are only one part of the story, and that the real test is approval by those competent to judge: pupils, heads, experienced observers, fellow teachers. There is no guaranteed agreement here either. Teachers may judge their fellows by their acceptability or otherwise as a staffroom colleague, and in many cases have not actually witnessed them teaching, whereas pupils see them every day in the classroom, but rarely in a social context. Heads are often dependent on indirect evidence such as plaudits or complaints from parents, the sound or absence of noise from their classroom, and more visible features, such as punctuality, dress, behaviour at staff meetings, report writing, or contribution to out-of-school activities.

There are also significant differences between primary and secondary schools. In open-plan primary schools, or where the head makes a practice of teaching alongside other teachers, professional competence or lack of it will be much more public than in a secondary school, where most teachers operate fairly privately inside their own box classroom. There are numerous significant differences between teaching and industrial processes. In teaching there is no single agreed outcome. In professional football the major objectives are to score goals and avoid conceding them; in many businesses the principal intention is to sell as many products as possible with maximum profits for shareholders and the minimum of complaints about poor quality from purchasers; doctors try to cure as many patients as they can, and dentists seek to reduce tooth decay and avoid the unnecessa...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• TABLES
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: THE APPRAISAL OF TEACHING
• CHAPTER 2: CLASSROOM OBSERVATION
• CHAPTER 3: THE ROLE OF THE LOCAL EDUCATION AUTHORITY
• CHAPTER 4: THE NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
• CHAPTER 5: APPRAISAL IN CASEWELL SCHOOL
• CHAPTER 6: TEACHERS’ VIEWS OF APPRAISAL
• CHAPTER 7: PREPARING FOR OBSERVATION
• CHAPTER 8: THE IMPLEMENTATION OF LESSON OBSERVATION
• CHAPTER 9: IMPROVING APPRAISAL— LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY