Session Information
16 SES 02 JS, The Role of ICT in the Context of School Improvement and Professional Development in an Era of Risk
Joint Symposium NW 01 and NW 16
Contribution
Determining teaching quality and feeding back the results to teachers serves important improvement and accountability purposes in education. One possible way to collect teaching quality scores is to measure the perception of students about their teachers’ teaching quality (Peterson, Wahlquist, & Bone, 2000). Modern ICT enables the efficient collection and processing of student perceptions of teaching quality as well as feeding back the results to teachers in order to support their professional development and improvement. For that purpose, the digital “Impact! tool” was developed by means of which students rate their teachers’ teaching quality at the end of a lesson. The teacher immediately sees the results and could use this information as a basis for professionalization. To our knowledge, little research has been done on the effects of using digital student feedback on teacher professionalization. In the current study, students’ perceptions of one lesson were measured by means of the Impact! tool and the feedback was presented to the teachers, to develop their insight into the strengths and weaknesses of their lessons. It was hoped that the feedback would promote teachers’ professional reflection on their teaching quality and that teachers would attempt to professionalize and improve their education. Results show that teachers gained insight into their improvements based on the student feedback. They did not seem to reflect statistically significant more on their lessons. Teachers reported improvement-oriented actions in response to the student feedback. According to students, teachers first slightly improved their teaching quality. However, the improvement did not sustain. How could that happen? Digital student feedback could serve as a ‘quick scan’ for teachers that provides them with insight into where there is room for improvement. That is however only a starting point for teachers. The research on deliberate practice (Ericsson, 2006) shows that sustainable development and professionalization requires a strong improvement motivation, clear definitions of ideal behaviour, the definition of small and precise goals, and intensive practice, guided by a coach, until the goals set have been accomplished. It is impossible for a teacher to know and do all this on his/her own. It is our aim to investigate under which conditions teacher professionalization with digital student feedback can be accomplished in a way that matches with the characteristics of deliberate practice, and with what is possible within the context of schools.
References
Ericsson, K. A. (2006). The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance. In K. A. Ericsson (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance (Vol. 38, pp. 685-705). Peterson, K. D., Wahlquist, C., & Bone, K. (2000). Student surveys for school teacher evaluation. Journal of personnel evaluation in education, 14(2), 135-153.
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