Educational Leadership - October 2009

The quality of an education system cannot exceed
the quality of its teachers and their work.

professional development tended to do more of it: Those who paid the full cost undertook more than twice as much training as those who received it free, although this partly reflects the fact that courses requiring a fee tend to lead to professional qualifications. This finding suggests providing professional development at no cost is not necessarily the only way to stimulate participation.

Teachers reported relatively infrequent teacher collaboration in their schools, signaling an area that school leaders and policies need to more aggressively promote. Teacher collaboration still predominantly takes the form of exchanging and coordinating ideas rather than engaging in the kinds of collaboration that research has shown can enhance student learning, such as joint lesson planning or team teaching. Although in many other fields people enter their professional lives expecting that evidence and research will transform their practice, results from the survey indicate that this expectation is not yet widespread in education.

the more feedback teachers receive on specific aspects of their work, the more they trust in their abilities to address the respective teaching challenges. Teachers report that the appraisal and feedback they receive not only improves their teaching skills, but also leads to changes in specific aspects of their teaching. In a number of countries (Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Lithuania, Malta, Norway, and Spain), teachers reported higher levels of self-efficacy when they received public recognition for improvements and innovations in connection with the appraisal.

But the survey also shows that, across countries, 13 percent of teachers receive no appraisal and feedback. This is particularly apparent in Ireland and Portugal, where one-quarter of teachers received no appraisal and feedback, and in Italy and Spain, where the same was true of approximately one-half of

teachers. Further, just under one-third of teachers across countries worked in schools that had not had an external evaluation in the last five years, and one-fifth worked in schools that had not even conducted a self-evaluation. In Korea, for example, a teacher in a school that has not been evaluated is more than twice as likely not to receive appraisal or feedback. The survey results suggest that schools in which schoolwide evaluation takes place also encourage appraisal and feedback for individual teachers.

Just one-half of the teachers reported that their school principal uses effective methods to determine teachers’ performance. This is clearly an area in need of improvement; analyses on the effects of evaluation, appraisal, and feedback suggest that such an investment can pay high dividends.

It is worrying that, on average across countries, three-quarters of teachers

Appraisal and Feedback

The survey shows that strong school-level evaluation tends to feed into better teacher appraisal and feedback, which, in turn, can feed into improvements in the classroom. Most teachers report that the feedback they receive from principals is fair and helpful and that it increases their job satisfaction, their development as teachers, and, to some extent, their job security. Survey results indicate that schools can likely overcome concerns about such practices if their evaluation culture is constructive and formative.