Education Week - March 15, 2023 - 9

Principals or Peers: Who Should Evaluate Teachers?
"
By Denisa R. Superville
Are principals the best people to do
teacher evaluations?
Not necessarily, a study published
in last month's Educational Policy
journal suggests.
The study found that peer-led evaluations
left teachers with more positive
feelings and more motivated to
make job-related changes compared
to evaluations conducted by principals
and other administrators.
But it wasn't just that teacher-led
evaluations left teachers feeling better;
those done by principals left
teachers objectively feeling worse and
less likely to make adjustments.
" It wasn't a neutral kind of thing, "
said Timothy G. Ford, an associate professor
at the University of Oklahoma.
Ford co-authored the paper, " Does It
Matter Who Evaluates Teachers? Principal
Versus Teacher-Led Evaluation
and Teacher Motivation, " with Alyson
L. Lavigne, an associate professor at
Utah State University.
" A lot of the times ... teachers were
coming away-with worse feelings
around their competence and their
motivation toward teacher evaluations
and teaching, and then they
were making fewer changes to their
practice. They are not really changing
what they did after those encounters. "
On top of that, Ford and Lavigne
found that the kind of carrotand-stick
measures built into many
American administrator-led teacherevaluation
systems-such as salary
increases for a job well done, or, on
the other end, the possibility of punishment
or termination-also did not
motivate teachers.
Their study is based on an analysis
of responses to questionnaires on
teachers' perceptions of their evaluations
and whether the feedback led
to positive changes in their confidence,
motivation, satisfaction, practice,
and use of student assessments.
The survey also asked principals how
often they used measures such as bonuses
and job changes as part of their
evaluations.
" This goes back to basic psychological
research, and that these sort of
strategies are very harmful for longterm
motivation of individuals, " Ford
said. " If the goal is to create a sort of
self-propelling practice-this idea of
we want this practice to continue, we
want it to be helpful and useful-then
using external rewards or punishment
systems, we continue to see that these
are harmful practices to have. "
To be clear, Ford added, " not every
application of external rewards or
punishment " was bad. Rather, it's
" how it's done and in what context
that creates the challenges. "
No clear conclusions
Even though the peer-led evaluations
led to more positive feelings and
motivation, it's hard to conclude from
their research whether it's better for
principals or teachers to do evaluations,
Ford said.
It's possible that some evaluative
tasks, such as classroom observations
or feedback sessions with teachers,
would be more appropriate for principals,
depending on the school culture,
while others may be better suited for
teachers, he said. Veteran teachers,
for example, may have more content
knowledge expertise to help younger
teachers improve. How the evaluation
is framed and how teachers feel about
it matter, too, he said.
It's also not really about whether
principals were doing a good or bad
job evaluating teachers, but whether
they were the best people in the
school to do it.
" There is an assumption that because
they are the authority figure
that they need to do it, " Ford said. " It
goes back to the idea of what is the
purpose of the evaluation. If the purpose
is to make teachers better, then
I think, maybe, the principal is not the
right person, necessarily, to do that.
We have enough valuable resources
in each of our schools in the form of
experienced teachers, who've been
there and have done that. "
While those teachers may still need
training on how to provide meaningful
feedback to their peers, for example,
" they understand what it's like to
be a teacher and receive feedback,
and they can be trained in ways [to do
so], " Ford said.
" If as a leader, you've cultivated a
culture of support around feedback
and evaluations, maybe not even calling
it evaluations, but simply providing
feedback and receiving feedback,
then I think principals can play that
role. That's maybe the role: It's more
of a facilitator of the evaluation that
happens in school than the person
who does it. "
The most challenging part of evaluations
is not the amount of paperwork
or the time it takes to complete. It's
the quality of the feedback, he said.
Schools with a culture of improvement
and trust and that embrace feedback
and mentorship may be more
conducive to peer-led evaluations.
" So much of giving good feedback
and having it used depends on the
context and the space that's created
around it, " Ford said. " I think a good
leader is going to look at a peer-led
system and say, ... 'Is this really appropriate
right now? Are we equipped to
do it in this way?' That's the role of the
leader in this. "
But another thing to consider is the
ultimate goal of evaluations. Models
that center around teacher growth and
development may be more effective
and should be prioritized over those
steeped in high-stakes accountability.
" Those two purposes of evaluations-the
summative and the evaluative-often
can be at odds with each
other, but they don't have to be, "
Ford said.
Leveraging teacher expertise
The furor over teacher evaluations,
which peaked during the
Obama administration's Race to
the Top competitive grant program,
has died down. The grant prompted
Most teachers
do not object to
being evaluated;
they really object,
a lot of times,
to the way it's
done and how
they feel at the
end of it.
TIMOTHY G. FORD
Associate professor
University of Oklahoma
many states to implement complicated
teacher-evaluation systems,
many of which heavily weighted
students' test scores and included
performance-pay incentives as well
as the threat of dismissal. They
transformed principals' jobs seemingly
overnight, requiring them to
spend a lot more time in classrooms
and filling out complicated and
time-consuming rubrics on teacher
competency.
Changes in federal policy since then
have given states more flexibility on
how to evaluate teachers. But many of
those Obama-era policies still remain
in place, Ford noted.
The analysis uses data from the
2013 TALIS [Teaching and Learning
International Survey] collected
from lower secondary schools (the
equivalent of middle schools) in the
United States and in other countries
that use both administrator-led and
peer-led evaluation systems. The
survey asked teachers and principals
in countries that are part of the Organization
for Economic Cooperation
and Development about school
conditions.
Ford and Lavigne analyzed data
from 36,411 teachers from 2,759
schools in 11 countries. The data were
collected at the time states were implementing
the Race to the Top-era
teacher-evaluation systems.
The researchers found that in the
major areas where teachers were assessed-observation
of their teaching
practice, content knowledge, and
analysis of student test scores-evaluations
led by teachers resulted in
more positive feelings of motivation,
satisfaction, and changes to practice
than administrator-led ones.
The study has some limitations. One
is that the data are nearly a decade
old at this point, and may not capture
changes that have taken place since.
Another is that the researchers do
not have additional insight into what
the schools meant when they said
" teacher-led " or " administrator-led. "
For example: What exactly were teachers
or principals doing during observations,
feedback sessions, or content
discussions, and did some schools have
more expert teachers than others?
And the data were collected at the
middle school level, where subjectarea
expertise may be more important
than in elementary schools, according
to the paper.
The paper recommends piloting
randomized experiments of teacherled
evaluation programs to get comparison
data on the effectiveness of
both teacher-led and more traditional,
administrator-driven evaluations.
But more important, Ford said,
would be including teachers in developing
these systems, a recommendation
he said that's not going to
be popular.
" There is a sense that if you give
somebody control over a system that's
designed to evaluate them, they're
going to exploit it, or they are going to
take advantage of it, " he said.
" My recommendation would be
bring teachers more into the conversation,
see how they'd like to be evaluated,
what they want to do, " he added.
" Most teachers do not object to being
evaluated; they really object, a lot of
times, to the way it's done and how
they feel at the end of it. "
WEBINAR
Improving Outcomes on State
Assessments with Data-Driven
Strategies
It's that time of year - state testing is looming. How
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cultivating collaborative, data-driven practices that go far beyond
simply teaching the test?
Join us in this webinar as we discuss:
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Immediate, actionable steps that can improve performance
Long-term strategies for supporting formative, data-driven
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Building a culture of teacher collaboration around
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https://edw.link/ImprovingAssessments
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MARCH 23
2-3 PM ET
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Education Week - March 15, 2023

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