Developing Effective Teacher Performance

Jeff Jones, Mazda Jenkin, Sue Lord

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781412919296, 9781412919289
• eBook ISBN: 9781446226384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Improving and maintaining staff performance is an important and often difficult responsibility for school leaders and senior teachers. Offering guidance on diagnosing ineffectiveness, supporting ineffective teachers, and procedures when support isn?t enough, this practical book is designed to help those teachers who manage others.

It will help the reader to understand what under-performance is, and to develop a whole school approach to monitoring, supporting and restoring teacher performance. There is also advice on self-help and development for the teachers themselves.

This is an essential one-stop reference text for every senior teacher in primary and secondary schools.

The challenge to schools posed by under-performing teachers

This chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book’s contents by discussing key questions raised by the issue of teacher under-performance in schools.The issues raised are revisited, in greater detail, in later chapters of the book.

What are the consequences for schools of teacher under-performance?

It has been said before and, in all probability, it will be said time and time again – the single most significant factor in a child’s learning is the teacher. Haim Ginott’s (1972) famous quote reminds us of the power that lies in the hands of teachers:

I have come to a frightening conclusion. I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humour, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de- escalated, and a child humanized or de-humanized.

Pupils have a remarkable flair for both recognising and valuing teachers whose enthusiasm shines through their teaching and whose high-order communication skills can be witnessed in every interaction they share. Given the weight of reform that teachers now carry, it is to their enormous credit that so many continue to bring this professionalism to bear on their work. A survey by Wragg et al. (2000) sums up the context of a teacher’s current role as follows:

During the last few years of the twentieth century there were many factors which combined to demand from teachers even higher levels of professional competence. They included the rapid growth in the acquisition of knowledge; the changing nature … of adult employment …; greatly increased public pressure for accountability, accompanied by numerous demands and changes to curriculum, assessment and conditions of service; the development of new forms of educational, information and communication technology and the ever broadening role of the teacher, with demands on skill spilling over into other professional fields like ‘administrator’, ‘social worker’ and ‘manager’.

It is not surprising, therefore, that some teachers do not cope with the demands made of them, with the result that their performance begins to deteriorate. Under-performing teachers present one of the most difficult challenges school leaders may ever encounter. Dean’s (2002) observation is that:

The headteacher and team leader see that pupils are getting a raw deal and hate the task of setting out to deal with the problem. Yet, such problems will not go away and such teachers do not always respond to support and encouragement.

Teachers who perform inadequately not only fail to achieve their own performance standards, but they can also affect the performance of those with whom they come into contact, e.g. other staff, pupils. Teachers’ under-performance can have a negative impact upon the:

• school’s reputation and standing in the community;
• attainment and achievements of pupils;
• performance of other teachers;
• performance of support staff; and
• leadership and management of the school.

With so much at stake, head teachers are understandably anxious about having to deal with these situations. As one head teacher commented:

Dealing with an ineffective teacher is the hardest thing a head ever does. You have to make yourself unpopular and you face the danger that the teacher will enlist support from other colleagues and you end up with a split in the school.

(Wragg et al., 2000)

Yet, to do nothing is to endanger the educational opportunities of many pupils and waste investment in the costliest resource any school has – its staff. It is also important not to underestimate the impact of this situation on the individual teacher. Invariably, the teacher loses self-esteem and confidence when placed in these circumstances.The longer this situation is allowed to continue without remediation, the more difficult it is to restore that teacher’s performance.

How is performance and under-performance defined?

It is difficult to arrive at a precise meaning of under-performance without first defining what is meant by ‘performance’. Armstrong (2000) maintains that ‘if performance cannot be defined, it can’t be measured or managed’. Bates and Holton (1995) underline the term’s complexity when they describe performance as a ‘multi-dimensional construct, the measurement of which varies depending on a variety of factors’.

Not surprisingly, there seems to be no universal agreement on what the term ‘performance’ means. However, as can be seen from the following definitions and descriptions, several researchers have attempted to add their contributions to our understanding:

… it is a record of a person’s accomplishments.

(Armstrong, 2000)

… something that the person leaves behind and that exists apart from the purpose.

(Kane, 1996)

… the outcomes of work because they provide the strongest linkage to the strategic goals of the organisation, customer satisfaction, and economic contribution.

(Bernadin et al., 1995)

… the accomplishment, execution, carrying out, working out of anything ordered or undertaken.

(Oxford Education Dictionary)

This latter definition refers to the achievement of outputs and outcomes, while also emphasising the importance of actually doing the work. Individuals’ performance could therefore be regarded as the way in which they get tasks (e.g. teaching, marking, assessments) done.

A dilemma faced by writers on the subject is whether to distinguish between the behaviour of performing from the outcomes of performance. Brumbach (1988) offers a more comprehensive view of performance by attempting to embrace both behaviour and outcomes. For him:

Performance means both behaviours and results. Behaviours emanate from the performer and transform performance from abstraction to action. Not just the instruments for results, behaviours are also outcomes in their own right – the product of mental and physical effort applied to tasks – and can be judged apart from results.

This definition of performance leads to the conclusion that an individual’s performance needs to be gauged with both behaviours and outcomes in mind.

Fidler and Atton (1999) chose to use the term ‘poor performers’ for employees who are not performing satisfactorily, stressing the point that such employees have major failings in a number of critical aspects of their work: ‘They fall below a threshold of satisfactory performance on a number of criteria: they are not just unsatisfactory in one small aspect of the job’. Implied here is the existence of a recognisable benchmark that can be used to determine minimum satisfactory performance. So, where do we find benchmarks? What are appropriate benchmarks for gauging the effectiveness of teachers’ performance?

What is now known about teacher effectiveness?

Teacher effectiveness has attracted particularly close scrutiny as part of the government’s drive to raise the quality of teaching and learning and, therefore, school standards. Attempts to define the skills, knowledge and attributes required by effective teachers to help them review their performance and to support them in their continuing professional development are signs of the government’s strategy to manage the teaching force.

The research commissioned from Hay/McBer by the, then, Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) was designed to provide a framework describing effective teaching. They set out to develop a clear description of teacher effectiveness, based on evidence of what effective teachers do in practice at different stages in the profession.

Effective teachers in the future will need to deal with a climate of continual change in which distance learning and other teaching media will become more prevalent. The ‘star teachers’ of the future will be those who work to make what is now the best become the standard for all. School managers will need to create a school climate that fosters a framework for continuous improvement. One critical dimension is likely to be openness to the integration of good practice from other teachers, schools, regions or even countries. This will require a shift in culture so that real team working is valued, and mutual feedback – through lesson observation or other means – is embraced as an essential part of professional development.

(Hay/McBer, 2000)

Recent research reveals that the greatest impact on overall school effectiveness is due to classroom-level factors, rather than school-level factors. For these reasons, attempting to identify what makes an effective teacher has become an important feature within the recognised research community. Muijs and Reynolds (2005), for example, conclude that effective teachers:

• have a positive attitude;
• develop a pleasant social/psychological climate in the classroom;
• have high expectations of what pupils can achieve;
• communicate lesson clarity;
• practise effective time management;
• employ strong lesson structuring;
• use a variety of teaching methods;
• use and incorporate pupil ideas; and
• use appropriate and varied questioning.

However, they remind us that effective teaching methods are context specific.What is needed for a teacher to be effective can vary depending upon factors such as:

• the type of activity in the lesson;
• the subject matter;
• the pupil backgrounds (such as age, ability, gender, socio-economic status and ethnicity);
• the pupils’ personal characteristics (such as personality, learning style, motivation and self-esteem); and
• the culture/organisation of the department, school and LEA.

How is teacher under-performance recognised?

Given the significant findings of research into essentially ‘what makes a good teacher?’, together with the increasing exposure of school practices and achievements to the public, it is relatively easy to identify teachers who are under-performing. Rather more difficult to gauge is the extent to which the under-performance is prolonged and consistent. Among the key means of identifying teacher under-performance are the following:

• feedback from external inspection (Ofsted);
• the outcomes of self-review and moderated self-review procedures;
• self-perceived problems;
• the outcomes of performance management reviews;
• scrutiny of pupil progress data;
• informal monitoring by middle and senior leaders;
• monitoring by local authority for school improvement;
• escalating disruptive pupil behaviour;
• lesson ob...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The challenge to schools posed by under-performing teachers
• 2 Recognising teacher under-performance
• 3 Supporting teachers to become more effective
• 4 Maintaining teacher performance through self-reflection
• 5 Using performance reviews to develop teacher performance
• 6 Promoting teacher development – a whole-school approach to CPD
• 7 Recruiting and selecting effective teachers
• 8 Case-studies: learning through reflection and action
• Bibliography
• Index