Assessing Your Teachers

I was musing about such heavy matters when I came across this post courtesy of my IP Hosting agent.

Let me summarise the matter for you.

There are two kinds of assessment available, criterion-based assessment and normative assessment. In the former, you must meet concrete objectives (e.g. has demonstrated ability to stand on the head without other bodily support, sip hot black coffee and mark 25 ELA1 answer scripts without breaks while singing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Der Messias backwards). In the latter, you are ranked against others who are put through equivalent trials and you score points (normally with little attention paid to where you score them as long as you score them).

Organisations such as the International Baccalaureate Organisation prefer the former. Other organisations (including some without websites) prefer the latter. (For those of you who have recently watched a certain Godfarthur video clip, you know what I mean.)

Some institutions concentrate on the production of grades, irrespective of how those grades are produced and what raw material these grades originate from. Some concentrate on other things either to obscure the grade data or to show that they can do plenty of other tricks as well. In such institutions, officers will be appraised on anything and everything; this is called 'open-ended appraisal'.

In some institutions where there is too much to appraise, the person who can present the most convincing case will net the booty. It doesn't always mean that the best teacher will get the largest bonus; if bonus funds are limited, even good teachers may be paid less. Furthermore, as teaching ability is a non-linear convex curve which plateaus off, it might be rapidly outstripped by the non-linear non-continuous functions available in other areas. How does one compare a gold in some violent territorial spheroid-transfer sport with a fair crop of distinctions from a once-idle class?

It strikes me that this 'profession' is one in which the direct clients have little structured feedback into the remuneration of their assigned officers. Rather, feedback from competing officers is sometimes used to assign bonuses. I use inverted commas around the word 'profession' because in many cases there is no local body which licenses teachers in a criterion-referenced approach. Lawyers, doctors and engineers have professional organisations which provide discipline and professional enhancement; teachers do not, and frankly would not welcome criterion-based assessment.

In my previous life, I once compared the assessment criteria of a large national healthcare institution with that of a large national educational institution. Here is a very brief summary.

Healthcare:

• A = international or regional reputation/standards met (lists follow) in clinical competence, clinical workload, teaching, research, and administrative ability
• B = regional to national, high impact output...
• C = good quality, regular professional output...
• D = meets departmental standards, some professional output...
• E = below departmental standards, poor output for time spent...

Having seen the full document, I am impressed at the amount of work done in the attempt to set criteria for grading.

Education:

• A = performs at two grades above current level in academic work, para-academic work and non-academic work
• B = performs at one grade above...
• C = performs at...
• D = meets requirements...
• E = does not meet requirements...

Having seen a huge sample of these documents, I am not impressed by the accuracy or effectiveness of many such documents. I am not alone, and so national education agencies have changed the format. I am still somewhat unmoved.

So, do you think we will be a better healthcare or a better education hub? And can you propose better ways of ranking teachers?