Teacher Evaluation: Educative Alternatives

A systematic exploration of the nature of teacher evaluation is presented. After a critique of the widespread impositional (or "dominant") mode of teacher evaluation, two alternative forms of teacher evaluation, referred to as "educative," are proposed. These educative teacher evaluation approaches, "horizontal" evaluation and a "critical" version of clinical supervision, take into account the relationship between teacher ideology and practice, encourage participants to form dialogical relations that critically assess this relationship, and attempt to shift the dialogue beyond individual teachers so that as many community members as possible become actively involved in assessing educational aims and practices. The educative model of teacher evaluation gives teachers more, rather than less, control over their work and allows teachers to examine a whole range of issues associated with the pedagogical process and school structures. The history of teacher evaluation in the United States, Australia, and England is reviewed briefly, suggesting that a view of teacher competency based on technical rationality has come to be used as a way of reproducing existing social relations and cultural capital.