Principal-Led State Evaluation Policy: Teacher Perceptions at Four High Schools

Abstract

While policy makers have attempted to standardize teacher evaluation, policy is implemented and enacted by school administrators. This study addresses the following question: Considering the legislative efforts to remove control of evaluation from local figures, do teachers perceive school principals as influencing the implementation of state-level evaluation policy and, if so, in what ways? I examined interviews from 14 teachers across four high schools within a district in North Carolina derived from a larger mixed method case study of teacher perceptions of evaluation policy and classroom practice. The results suggest a state-centralized teacher evaluation policy, such as the one utilized at the time of this study, can look vastly different to teachers at the school-level due to principal enactment of the policy. Furthermore, the data suggest the following themes influenced policy implementation: the capacity of principals to evaluate in a timely manner, what a principal chooses to value in a policy, and the perceived effectiveness of a principal as an evaluator of teaching. By taking a closer look at what is happening “on the ground” between teachers and principals in four schools utilizing the same state-level evaluation policy, the lessons learned in this study can help inform future policies.

What Makes Classroom Observation Feedback Useful? The Perceptions of Secondary Math and English Teachers

“…The fourteen teachers' interviews for the original study serve as the data source for this paper (Table 1). The interviews had been transcribed and previously coded in qualitative software to answer other research questions around teacher perceptions of formal evaluation (Frasier, 2017;Frasier, 2021;Frasier, in press). While the initial study was targeted at gauging perceptions of formal evaluations, which included a standardized observation protocol, all the teachers interviewed were also prompted to discuss their experiences with informal observations.…”

“…Additionally, teachers need to feel confident that their administrator understands what good teaching looks like (Donahue & Vogel, 2018;Frasier, 2021;Kimball, 2022;Stiggins & Duke, 1988). For teachers, this can manifest as the observer providing specific, evidence-based feedback which requires a knowledge of effective instructional practices and management techniques (Derrington & Kirtk, 2017;Smith et al, 2020).…”