Managing Teacher Appraisal and Performance

Carol Cardno, David Middlewood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134547784
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The biggest single issue currently facing school managers is how they should appraise their staff and what the implications of the process are. This edited collection brings together the latest thinking on the subject, from both the UK and overseas, and places it directly in the context of school management. Issues discussed include the role of appraisal in school leadership and the role of appraisal in developing teachers. The importance of this combined with the lack of published material on the subject make this book an essential purchase for all headteachers, heads of department, INSET co-ordinators and postgraduate educational management students.

Chapter 1: The significance of teacher performance and its appraisal

David Middlewood and Carol Cardno

The context of the growing importance of education

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, an increasing consensus developed concerning the link between economic prosperity and the effectiveness of a country’s education provision. As globalisation gathered pace dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s, this link became more overt as the comparison and competitiveness between nations inevitably increased. At the heart of the argument for the link is the need for an educated workforce, without which a country’s economy will not keep pace. This has been equally clear in the established western countries and the emerging Asian ‘tiger’ economies of the 1980s and 1990s. What is meant by an ‘educated workforce’ will necessarily differ but central to the production of this clearly lies the quality of teaching and learning in a nation’s schools, colleges and universities.

These two factors at the macro international level—the emphasis on comparisons and competitiveness and on the quality of teaching and learning— have been reflected within many countries. The concern of governments in countries whose practice is described in this book, has been increasingly with comparisons between schools. This has been accompanied by the international movement towards schools’ self-governance and self-management, leading to the conflict, real or potential, between the laudable desire to raise standards for all school students and the influence of the marketisation upon schools. This latter influence has led to intense debate in countries such as New Zealand, the United Kingdom, USA, and Canada about the disadvantaging of certain students, especially in urban areas, caused by resource allocation.

All this is very familiar but the significance for teaching and learning and consequently for any assessment of teacher performance is that comparisons and competitiveness inevitably have meant that governments have placed the emphasis upon education outcomes, such as proficiency in literacy and numeracy, examination results, test scores, and numbers of students continuing beyond statutory schooling. The significance of these is that outcomes have to be seen to be measurable, because only in measurable outcomes can comparisons be visibly made. This emphasis on the measurable brings with it a considerable risk. As Preedy (2000:95) suggests:

Many of the most valuable outcomes of education are multi-dimensional, complex and long term…. By focusing on measuring outcomes against pre-specified objectives, the product evaluation model ignores unplanned outcomes, and fails to explore the value and worth of the prescribed objectives and purposes. There is also a tendency to de-emphasise contextual factors…

None of this is any argument against teachers and schools needing to be accountable. Clearly they have to be accountable in a visible way, both to the students and parents whom they serve and to the taxpayer for the considerable sums invested in education. Any system of performance and its appraisal in education must capture this essential requirement and, later in this chapter, we examine this in detail.

Preedy’s comment captures the essence of a potential dilemma in the assessment of teachers’ performance. If the emphasis in an educational system is on measurable outcomes and schools are deemed successes or failures according to those outcomes, then effective teaching will be seen as that which achieves those outcomes. The temptation therefore is for national bodies to promulgate a model of teaching which lends itself to this and to appraise teachers accordingly. In the UK, the model of effective teaching as presented by the OFSTED Framework of Inspection of Schools (OFSTED, 1997), and against which teachers’ lessons were formally graded during one-off inspections, was widely criticised, not because it was an invalid model but because it was presented as the only model. It was above all an outcomes model because the inspection model of the UK in the 1990s was itself essentially one concerned with inspecting schools’ attainments.

The complexity of assessment of teaching

The question of defining good teaching has concerned educationalists and academics for some considerable time. As Kyriacou (1986) postulated, perceptions of teaching depend upon philosophical premises anyway—is it a craft, an art, a science for example? The debates about the ‘deskilling’ of teachers (Ozga 1995) and whether teachers are professionals (Hoyle 1995) simply illustrate the complexity further. However, even if a model based upon measurable outcomes is assumed for the purposes of appraising the effectiveness or otherwise of a teacher’s performance, the issue of context remains a complicating factor.

Much of the issue of context that is relevant here is related to the extent to which schools are held responsible for the success or otherwise of their students. Stoll and Myers (1998:9), draw attention to the distinct difference between the majority of countries who refer to ‘failure of pupils’ and a few who talk in terms of ‘school failure’. Where school failure is emphasised, external context has low consideration and school managers and teachers are criticised for having expectations of pupils. The school improvement literature has come to acknowledge the significance of the context of schools. Stoll and Reynolds (1997:31) recognise that: ‘What is needed is knowledge of specific factors that will generate improvement for particular schools in particular socioeconomic and cultural contexts.’

The issue for assessing the performance of teachers who work in schools in very different contexts and situations is that it reveals the inadequacy of any single narrow model of appraisal, especially one focused upon measurable outcomes. Any list of criteria of effective teaching will be perceived as unfair when it is linked to required outcomes which can be affected so significantly by factors outside the teacher’s and indeed the school’s control. Thrupp (1999:157) says that:

A nationally consistent list of attributes of quality or competent teachers is likely to remain elusive. Rather, contextual differences related to student composition will have to be carefully considered if we are at all serious about assessing teachers fairly.

Thrupp goes on to make the important point that even if a value-added approach is able to take account of individual differences between students, teachers working in disadvantaged school contexts will ‘inevitably appear inferior because of additional difficulties related to the group characteristics of their students’ (ibid.).

For the managers of teacher performance and its appraisal, Thrupp’s (1999) own study of schools in Wellington, New Zealand, illustrated some of the contextual issues beyond the manager’s control. For example, a school in a prosperous area with powerful parental support attracted a good field of applicants for advertised teaching posts. In that situation, where teachers were under-performing, rigorous action could be taken. In less advantaged schools, whilst managers would not tolerate incompetence and were equally ready to start competency procedures where appropriate, there was less scope for action since:

Not only were they limited in this time they could spend on competency procedures, but they often struggled to find good staff in any case…. Senior staff…were aware that some staff were ineffectual but consoled themselves that such teachers were valuable to the school in other ways.

(Thrupp 1999:114–15)

It can also be argued that what it means to be an effective teacher will actually be quite different in different contexts. So that, in contrasting the most successful teachers in a working-class school with those in a school in an affluent area, Thrupp (1999:130) claimed that success was achieved in quite different ways. In the working-class school:

the most successful teachers were those who took a highly structured role which could create controlled classroom environments…. In this sense they were ‘trainers’. An emphasis on motivation/discipline and structured learning tasks seemed to be necessary.

In contrast, at the advantaged school, the most successful teachers ‘were those who took a low-key role by providing the necessary stimulus material or discussion starters that allowed students to learn independently’ (ibid.).

Even if it is true that ‘gifted teachers create excellence almost regardless of what is going on around them’ (OECD 1997:21) no system of appraising performance can rely for its basis on such a serendipitous view. If a single system based on measurable outcomes is deficient, similarly a generalised list of qualities of the ‘good’ teacher has only limited value. Lists such as those of Hopkins et al. (1994), OECD (1997), Ramsay and Oliver (1998) incorporate qualities such as intelligence, commitment, compassion, sense of humour, determination, etc. These are critically important in understanding the nature of teachers and teaching but are relatively unhelpful to managers of performance appraisal. To our knowledge, no one has ever successfully ‘assessed’ a sense of humour, for example!

Nevertheless, these lists of qualities draw attention to the vitally important point that a measurable outcomes only assessment model ignores, i.e. that teachers are not automatons. Teachers are persons with emotions, aspirations, and need for self-esteem; and their success in their jobs will depend upon the extent to which these are successfully channelled. This is true of most occupations, but is particularly so in jobs such as teaching where relationships with others are at the core of effectiveness (in their case with the students). The issue therefore of how teachers are personally and professionally developed is central to their performance and therefore of the appraisal of that performance.

The performance management context

If the management of performance may be seen as having at least three key ingredients for the employee:

• knowing what is required to be done;
• receiving guidance, support and challenge when required;
• receiving regular feedback about progress and achievement

then managing the professional development of those employees is crucial particularly to the second of these and forms the key part of the regular cycle of target-setting, implementing, reviewing, feeding back, and taking new action.

As various chapters in this book show, practice in different countries varies according to the emphasis placed upon accountability or upon the professional development of teachers. Thus systems of performance appraisal may be seen as existing on a simple continuum (Figure 1.1), according to where the emphasis lies.

As writers such as Day (1996) and Middlewood (1997) have argued, professional development can be as affected by individual school context as the quality of teaching and, similarly, no one simplistic model of professional development could provide for all teachers. Missing ingredients seen as essential to the development of certain teachers will not be met by any one recipe of training and may only be provided perhaps by school leaders and managers offering a culture within which development opportunities occur. For school headteachers/principals themselves, O’Neill (2000:8), has drawn attention to ‘The missing professional standards’ of ‘Ethics and social justice’ in the current appraisal of principals, whilst West-Burnham in Chapter 2 of this book suggests that some elements of leadership, as opposed to management, cannot be instilled through training courses.

Figure 1.1 Continuum of emphasis in systems of performance appraisal.

Any acknowledgement that teachers have personal and professional needs as well as being employees who produce outcomes has to recognise also one other factor. In common with certain other occupations (commonly and sometimes unhelpfully known as the ‘caring’ professions), teachers have strong beliefs and values concerned with the work they do. Most teachers believe not just in teaching but in the value of education itself, as a ‘force for good’. This is a belief that education can have a transformational influence upon the young people in the system, and that there are many invisible elements to this, of which class lessons form one—a critically important one but not the only element. Middlewood (1997:183) has described the tension between this ‘transformational’ aspect of education and the ‘transactional’ aspect of lessons as being necessary to acknowledge in any appraisal of teacher performance. The reason that we draw attention to this is twofold:

1. 1 By recognising the importance of education, teachers need to accept (and there is evidence in this book that most do) the need to be accountable in the work they do.
2. 2 Their belief in education being more than measurable results suggests that it is essential to acknowledge their worth as people by developing their self-esteem, motivation, etc. as described above.

This second point is often brought out in work done on students’ perceptions of teachers who acknowledge not only efficiency (e.g. in preparing them for examinations) but fairness, ability to motivate, and similar qualities.

In reconciling any tension between the need for accountability and for professional development, any system of performance and its appraisal ideally needs to address ways of managing this tension. In the next section of this chapter, we examine the context for performance appraisal in particular and explore the notions of teacher accountability and development.

Different purposes of performance appraisal

New Zealand schools illustrate well the situation of those that have now been struggling for a decade to implement effective appraisal systems that serve several purposes simultaneously. This struggle is compounded by the fact that in an integrated system, the dual purposes of appraisal must be met at several levels as Table 1.1 shows. The multi-level purposes of appraisal are related to accountability and development at the level of the education system, the organisation, and the individual at both a professional and personal level.

Table 1.1 Multi-level purposes of appraisal systems

The challenge is heightened further when these needs are expected to be met at both the organisational and the individual level. Appraisal invariably exacerbates the essential dilemma faced by leaders which, as Beare et al. (1989) assert, is a concern for meeting the needs of the organisation and a concern for relationships between individuals.

Attempts to separate these dimensions of appraisal and attend to them in isolation from one another have not succeeded in education in the past. It is contended here that such polarised approaches will not succeed in the future either. To manage a performance appraisal system effectively it is necessary to understand the complexity inherent in appraisal system development and in the interpersonal dynamics that dominate the implementation of these systems. What is needed is a refraining of the demands of appraisal activity in a human resource format (Bolman...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: The significance of teacher performance and its appraisal
• Part I: Performance appraisal and school leadership
• Part II: Performance appraisal and teacher development
• Part III: The way ahead