Teacher Ambivalence to School Evaluation- Promoting and Ruining Teacher Professionalism

Author(s):

Charlotta Edström(presenting / submitting)Agneta Hult(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

23 SES 12 A, School Reforms in a Performative Culture

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-05

09:00-10:30

Room:

B331 Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Linda Rönnberg

Contribution

General description on research questions, objectives and theoretical framework

In the Western world evaluations seem to be an almost daily activity for all of us nowadays. We are asked to evaluate practically every service or activity we engage in and evaluations seem to be ‘something almost sacred’ (Dahler- Larsen 2012, p 3) in what Dahler- Larsen calls the evaluation society and Michael Power (1997) the audit society. Further research is needed about how the ‘terrors of performativity’ (Ball 2003; Ball et al. 2013), including an ever increasing emphasis on evaluations, affects what goes on in schools. In Sweden this ‘insatiable evaluation monster’ (Dahler-Larsen 2012, p 1, Lindgren, 2008) has been on the loose for quite a while and the deteriorating results for Sweden in the international Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests have not reduced the interest for evaluation. Evaluations of schools and teachers’ work are carried out from different levels: international level (e.g. PISA, TIMSS); national level (e.g. Swedish Schools Inspectorate, national tests in different subjects); municipal/principal organiser level (e.g. quality reports, questionnaires on well-being of students and staff) and school level (e.g. teachers’ persistent reporting on student outcome, questionnaires on equal treatment). The teachers themselves are also constantly evaluating their own teaching. Media are very interested in reporting results from international, national and municipal evaluations, especially the bad results (Rönnberg, et.al 2013) and often hold teacher responsible for the poor performance of students.

The desired effect of school evaluations, an improvement in school performance, has so far been lacking. What about other consequences of evaluation in school? The aim of this paper[i] is to investigate teachers’ approaches to the current evaluation discourse and evaluations carried out in schools today. This is done by exploring teachers’ views on enactment (Ball et al. 2013) of external and own evaluations and the restraints set by evaluation discourse. The evaluation society has gained ground all over Europe and since the powerful voices in education policy today are politicians and policy makers and not teachers, further knowledge about teachers’ perspectives on evaluations and the kinds of evaluations they consider enhance teacher professionalism is of interest also in a European perspective.

School evaluations often aim to control teachers, and make them account for what, how, and why they do what they do when they are teaching. This ‘lure of the explicit’ is according to Green (2011, p 139) problematic since trying to codify and articulate this kind of professional and tacit (Polanyi 1966) knowledge tends to reduce and ruin its complexity. Green claims that this ambition to make teacher knowledge explicit also ruins teachers’ sense of responsibility. Professional responsibility cannot be reduced and formulated in an instruction, ‘the more someone is tied down by specific instructions /…/the less they can be held responsible to see to it that things go well generally within their sphere of responsibility’ (Green, p 91). On the contrary, teachers need opportunities and time to reflect on professional values in their day-to-day practice together with their colleagues in order to improve their professionalism (e.g. Biesta 2009, Hodkinson 2009).

Evaluation activities can also be discussed in relation to constitutive effects (Dahler- Larsen 2011, 2013) since they have the power to change the way we understand the phenomena that is evaluated. ‘By constitutive effects I refer to how QAE (quality assurance and evaluation) redefines the meaning of education and the practices of education by means of installing new discursive and cultural markers defining standards, targets and criteria’ (Dahler-Larsen 2011, p 153).

[i] A project financed by The Swedish Research Council, Consequences of evaluation for school praxis- governance, accountability and organisational change.

Method

Methodology We have carried out interviews with 43 compulsory school teachers. This material has been complemented with results from a teacher questionnaire and schools’ evaluation documentation. The interviews were carried out in eight schools in four Swedish municipalities that are all middle size cities. When selecting the eight case schools, two from each of the four municipalities, the main criteria were differences in the evaluation forms and development of the schools’ evaluations. Differences with regards to principal organiser, the schools’ score on national performance measures and socio-economic composition, were to also taken into consideration. Some head teachers were hesitant and did not want to participate in the study, since they did not want to add to their teachers’ workloads. The majority of the 43 interviewed teachers were women, work in lower secondary school, and have experience of teaching in different subjects. During the interviews, that were carried out in focus groups, we used ‘evaluations’ as an umbrella term to cover a spectra from less formal oral follow-ups to written evaluations, assessments and tests.. The interview questions concerned teachers’ experiences of and opinions about international, national, principal organiser, school and own evaluations. The interviews lasted for 60 to120 minutes, and were recorded and fully transcribed. The interview transcripts have, bearing the theoretical framework described above in mind, been read and analysed thoroughly with emphasis on identifying and presenting key themes. The additional material; results from a questionnaire carried out in the four municipalities, that 150 lower secondary school teachers responded to; and documentation concerning the eight schools’ evaluations; have been used as a complement.

Expected Outcomes

Expected outcomes Our preliminary results show that the teachers’ approaches seem to follow two main lines of reasoning that clearly indicate an ambivalence concerning the current evaluation discourse and evaluations. In the first theme the teachers argue that the important type of evaluations are the ones done in their daily work, for example when asking students for feed-back after lessons and discussing problems with teacher colleagues. According to the teachers these evaluations are the ones that enable them to improve their teaching practices. They highlight knowledge that is hard to make explicit and communicate in evaluations from ‘outside’ sources, it is a kind of tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966). Emphasis is on reflection and external evaluations are basically described as ‘stealing’ time from developing teaching. In the second theme teachers partly embrace the evaluation discourse as having a tempting and quite reasonable logic: monitoring the state of things; trying to improve things in need of improvement; follow up results and then start all over again. Evaluations from ‘above’, for example from the municipality are meant to follow this logic. One obvious problem for the teachers is that there is far too little time to ‘live up to’ that logic, and the evaluation often only reaches the first phase: monitoring. Another problem is that these evaluations often are developed by people far from the practice of teaching, and this makes teachers feel alienated when they try to complete the forms, because the evaluations do not ‘talk’ to them and their everyday teaching. Using Dahler-Larsens (2013) terminology, a possible constitutive effect that overall is discernible in the interviews is that the current emphasis on evaluations seems to have directed focus on students’ school performances as the main issue and outcome concerning school quality - a focus also evident in current European education policy.

References

References Ball, Stephen (2003): The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy 18(2). 215-228. Ball, Stephen; Maguire, Meg; Braun, Annette; Hoskins, Kate & Perryman, Jane (2013): How schools do policy: policy enactments in secondary schools. London and New York: Routledge. Biesta, Gert (2009) Values and ideals in teachers’ professional judgement. In Gewirtz, S; Mahony, P: Hextall, I & Cribb, A (Eds) Changing Teacher Professionalism. International trends, challenges and ways forward. London: Routledge. Dahler-Larsen, Peter (2011): Afterword. Evaluation as a field and as a source of reflection: Comments on how QAE restructures education now and in the future. I Jenny Ozga; Peter Dahler-Larsen; Christina Segerholm & Hannu Simola, red: Fabricating Quality in Education. Data and Governance in Europe, s 150-159. London and New York: Routledge. Dahler-Larsen, Peter (2012): Constitutive effects as a social accomplishment: A qualitative study of the political in testing. Education Inquiry 3(2), 171-186. Dahler-Larsen, Peter (2013): Constitutive Effects of Performance Indicators. Getting beyond unintended consequences. Public Management Review. iFirst article: 1-18. DOI:10.1080/14719037.2013.770058 Green, Jane (2011): Education, Professionalism and the Quest for Accountability. Hitting the target but missing the point. New York: Routledge. Hodkinson, Hether (2009) Improving schoolteachers’ workplace learning. In Gewirtz, S; Mahony, P: Hextall, I & Cribb, A (Eds) Changing Teacher Professionalism. International trends, challenges and ways forward. London: Routledge. Lindgren, Lena (2008). Utvärderingsmonstret. [The Evaluation Monster. In Swedish.]. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Polanyi, Michael (1966). The Tacit Dimension. New York: Doubleday. Rönnberg, Linda; Lindgren, Joakim & Segerholm, Christina (2013): In the Public Eye. In the public eye: Inspection and local newspapers - exploring the audit–media relationship. Journal of Education Policy 28(2), 178-197.

Author Information

Charlotta Edström (presenting / submitting)

Umeå University

Department of Applied Educational Science

Umeå

Agneta Hult (presenting)

Umeå University, Sweden

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