Teacher evaluation practices in Malaysian primary schools: issues and challenges

This paper describes a qualitative case study that investigated the underlying issues in implementing school-based teacher evaluation practices in four Malaysian primary schools. The participants of the study comprised eight school administrators and sixteen teachers. Data obtained through interviews, observations, and document reviews were analyzed using the constant comparative method. The analysis captured four thematic constructs as key aspects of the school-based teacher evaluation system, namely: policy direction, evaluation methods, instruments, and utilization of evaluation results. The paper recommends revamping of the existing school-based teacher evaluation system along the emergent constructs identified in the study.     

Teacher capabilities in a multicultural educational environment: an analysis of the impact of a professional development project

With more programmes being taught through English in non-Anglophone contexts, higher education lecturers are faced with new challenges. This article briefly presents a professional development initiative carried out at departmental level as an intervention for all English Medium Instruction lecturers. In order to assess the effect of such an intervention, a mix of different data sets are used, moving from self-assessment by participants to observations of individual teaching practices in the classrooms. It is shown how corroboration of surveys and observation reports in an explicit feedback template can be used to evidence the value of the intervention in context.     

Affordances of teacher professional learning in secondary schools

It is commonly understood that teachers in secondary school should develop throughout their career in order to stay as an essential factor in student learning. Schools can offer opportunities to link teachers’ professional learning to their school practice with a positive impact on teachers’ motivation to learn and the effectiveness of their learning. In this field study, teachers, school leaders, policy-makers, educational consultants and educational scholars were asked for their perceptions of conditions for teacher learning in school and of interventions in school to enhance teacher professional learning. These conditions and interventions were understood as affordances in schools that enable and support teacher professional learning. The main affordance in school these stakeholders mentioned was an open, but critical way in which teachers share their practices, collaborate and reflect upon their teaching practice. Collaborative practices seem to stimulate many interventions of teacher professional learning in school. Two implications of this finding are discussed. First, we suggest that the maximum teaching time should be reduced, team teaching should be more implemented or classes should be scheduled in such a way that teachers can meet. Second, distributed leadership approaches match with our findings about the role of school leaders in teacher professional learning.     

Associations between school-level environment and science classroom environment in secondary schools

This article describes a study of links between school environment and science classroom environment. Instruments to assess seven dimensions of school environment (viz., Empowerment, Student Support, Affiliation, Professional Interest, Mission Consensus, Resource Adequacy and Work Pressure) and seven dimensions of classroom environment (viz., Student Affiliation, Interactions, Cooperation, Task Orientation, Order & Organisation, Individualisati n and Teacher Control) in secondary school science classrooms were developed and validated. The study involved a sample of 1,318 students in 64 year 9 and year 12 science classes and 128 teachers of science in Australian secondary schools. Using the class mean as the unit of analysis for student data, associations between school and classroom environment were investigated using simple, multiple and canonical correlational analyses. In general, results indicated weak relationships between school and classroom environments and they reinforced the view that characteristics of the school environment are not transmitted automatically into science classrooms.     

Practical work: Its effectiveness in primary and secondary schools in England

We report here on the first of two evaluations of a national project (Getting Practical: Improving Practical Work in Science—IPWiS) designed to improve the effectiveness of practical work in both primary and secondary schools in England. This first baseline evaluation of the effectiveness of practical work is based on a study of a diverse range of 30 practical lessons undertaken in non‐selective primary (n = 10) and secondary (n = 20) schools prior to the teachers undertaking a training intervention designed to improve their effective use of practical work. A multi‐site case study approach employing a condensed fieldwork strategy was used in which data were collected, using audiotape‐recorded discussions, interviews, and observational field notes. The analysis, based on work by Millar et al. and Tiberghien, considers what students do and think relative to what their teacher intended them to do and think. In both primary and secondary schools, the widespread use of highly structured “recipe” style tasks meant that practical work was highly effective in enabling students (n = 857) to do what the teacher intended. Whilst tasks in primary schools tended to be shorter than in secondary schools, with more time devoted to helping students understand the meaning of new scientific words, neither primary nor secondary teachers' lesson plans incorporated explicit strategies to assist students in making links between their observations and scientific ideas. As such, tasks were less effective in enabling students to use the intended scientific ideas to understand their actions and reflect upon the data they collected. These findings suggest that practical work might be made more effective, in terms of developing students' conceptual understanding—an aim of the IPWiS project—if teachers adopted a more “hands‐on” and “minds‐on” approach and explicitly planned how students were to link these two essential components of practical work. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 1035–1055, 2012     

Bullying in 25 secondary schools: incidence,impact and intervention

This paper outlines an investigation of the incidence and impact of physical, verbal and property-violation bullying in 25 secondary schools within a partnership operating with Keele University. The investigation also considers the impact of antisocial behaviour on pupils and the effectiveness of intervention to secure improved behaviour patterns. Evidence shows that in any year 75 per cent of pupils are bullied but that severe and repeated bullying is likely to be perpetrated and suffered by about seven per cent of pupils. Four behaviour patterns can be identified: bullies, bullies who are also victims, victims and non-participants, and the link between behaviour and factors in developing self-esteem is explored. Successful intervention requires a change of attitude on the part of both pupils and the community, a willingness to report events, and an understanding of respect for personal space.     

Measuring the professional learning environment of schools: Linkages to school effectiveness and effects

This study is a conceptual and empirical extension of a variety of recent investigations that have attempted to establish linkages between and syntheses among school environment characteristics and school effectiveness. Of particular interest was the extent to which the adult professional learning environment characteristics of schools can be conceptualized, operationalized, and linked to multiple indices of school effectiveness. The development and construct validation of a measure of teachers' perceptions of structural and cultural factors enhancing their learning in the school environment is described for a large sample of teachers in elementary, middle, and secondary schools. Implications for future research and theory development on school level environments are discussed.     

Inter‐professional work and expertise: New roles at the boundaries of schools

The findings discussed here are based on five case studies and a small survey (n = 46) of how secondary schools are responding to demands that they collaborate with other services to intervene to prevent the social exclusion of children and young people. The case studies revealed a new space of action opening up around schools where practices were being shaped by ‘welfare managers’ who were employed by schools and were undertaking responsive work with vulnerable children and young people and the other services who were also supporting them. At the same time heads of year and/or heads of school and form tutors were increasingly focusing on children's achievement in school. The changes in roles and responsibilities were encouraged by workforce remodelling and changes in criteria for teachers’ salaries. However, focusing primarily on the work undertaken by the welfare managers, the article draws on cultural‐historical activity theory analyses of relational agency and distributed expertise to question whether welfare managers can undertake the work required in the new space of action without attention to the development of their core expertise.     

农村中小学教师职业认同现状调查分析

教师良好的职业认同是稳定农村教师队伍、提高农村教育质量的关键.四川省农村中小学教师的职业责任感较强,但职业认同度不高;教师的职业认同在性别、年龄、学历、任教学科上差异明显.究其原因,教师的职业认同受到职业认识、职业贲任、职业满意度、职业压力等因素的综合影响.     

Assessing the psychosocial environment of science classes in Catholic secondary schools

Much Catholic school and church rhetoric suggests that Catholic schools possess distinctive learning environments. Research into this aspect of Catholic schooling has been hampered by the lack of an appropriate assessment instrument. By drawing on contemporary church literature, the perceptions of personnel involved in Catholic education and existing classroom environment questionnaires, a new instrument was developed to assess student perceptions of classroom psychosocial environment in Catholic schools. The use of this instrument in 64 classrooms in Catholic and Government schools indicated significant differences on some scales. The distinctive nature of Catholic schooling did not extend to all classroom environment dimensions deemed important to Catholic education. Specializations: Catholic education, learning environments. Specializations: conceptual change in students, science teacher professional development, scientific reasoning, learning environments. Specializations: learning environments, science education, educational evaluation, curriculum.     

Determinants of classroom environment in Queensland secondary schools: a multilevel reanalysis

This paper reports the reanalysis of data collected in a study of 3 determinants of classroom environment (viz. year level, subject, and school type) using multivariate analysis of variance and multilevel analysis. Data were collected from 2,211 students in Queensland Catholic and government schools. The Catholic School Classroom Environment Questionnaire, which assesses student affiliation, interactions, cooperation, task orientation, order and organisation, individualisation, and teacher control, was administered to the sample. The original multivariate analyses which used the class as the unit of analysis were supplemented by similar analyses using the student as the unit of analysis and multilevel analyses. While multilevel analyses yielded tests of significance results similar to multivariate analyses conducted with the class as the unit of analysis, effect sizes for the multilevel analyses were similar to those reported for multivariate tests conducted with the student as the unit of analysis.     

论影响中小学教师专业发展的基本因素

当前中小学教师专业发展面临着根基性的难题,主要表现在教师工资、教师学习、学校管理、教师培训与专家引领等方面,这些问题的解决是有效促进教师专业发展的前提。     

Adoption of flipped learning in social humanities education: the FIBER experience in secondary schools

ABSTRACT

FIBER (Flipped Issue-Based Enquiry Ride) is a teacher-facilitated interactive pedagogic framework that the authors propose to integrate flipped learning into social humanities education. This paper reports a quasi-experimental study (with mixed methods) which examined the pedagogic effectiveness of FIBER in the authentic setting of formal curriculum learning and teaching. The study involved totally 611 Secondary-4 students from academically top, middle and bottom schools in Hong Kong. In comparison with the conventional issue-based enquiry learning approach, FIBER had different intensity of positive effects on the high, moderate, and low academic-achieving student participants. This paper provides researchers and educational practitioners with empirical evidence for supporting wider adoption of FIBER in social humanities education, as well as harnessing flipped learning in formal schooling. Apart from discussing the benefits, the authors also underline the challenges of FIBER and suggest future work.     

The impact of banning mobile phones in Swedish secondary schools

Recently, policy makers worldwide have suggested and passed legislation to ban mobile phone use in schools. The influential (and only quantitative) evaluation by Beland and Murphy (2016), suggests that this is a very low-cost but effective policy to improve student performance. In particular, it suggests that the lowest-achieving students have the most to gain. Using a similar empirical setup but with data from Sweden, we partly replicate their study and thereby add external validity to this policy question. Furthermore, we increase the survey response rate of schools to approximately 75 %, although at the expense of the amount of information collected in the survey. In Sweden, we find no impact of mobile phone bans on student performance and can reject even small-sized gains.     

Teacher identity in the context of literacy teaching: Three explorations of classroom positioning and interaction in secondary schools

This article presents the results of three separate studies of literacy teaching and learning in the U.S. that explore the social functions of language, specifically focused on the identity development of literacy learners and teachers. Each study offers a detailed account of how literate identities are constructed and enacted and the positive and negative consequences that occur for teachers and students when they are enacted. Taken together, these three studies demonstrate how teachers' and students' understandings of identity can promote or inhibit literacy teaching and learning.     

The relationship between departments as professional communities and student achievement in secondary schools

Secondary school teaching is organized in departments and effective departments functioning as collaborative teams have been associated with effective schools. Therefore, this study investigates the relationship of mathematics departments perceived as professional communities and student achievement in Dutch secondary schools. Cluster analysis and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) were used on a sample of around 3000 students, 130 schools, and 130 teachers that participated in this study (TIMSS-2003 data). The significant effects found (effect size >.20) show that those departments that focus on reflective dialogue, collaborative activity, shared vision and student achievement are associated with successful schools and higher student achievement.     

论中小学校园信息文化环境构建

信息技术的发展深刻地改变着人们的生活方式、工作方式、交往方式和思维方式,已经演变成一种文化现象,即信息文化;信息文化教育是时代发展的要求,是社会对劳动者基本素质培养的要求;信息文化的培养需要在浓郁的信息文化氛围中进行,一个健康浓郁的校园信息文化是信息技术教育成功的保障。     

The continuing politics of mistrust: performance management and the erosion of professional work

For the past two decades schools and teachers in New Zealand and elsewhere have been the subject of and subjected to intense public scrutiny of their performance and professional activities. In effect, policy solutions have cast teacher and school performance as a ‘problem’ to be solved/resolved via the intervention of the State. Consequently, the policy remedy has been the introduction of audit mechanisms such as systems of performance management to define, regulate and control teaching and teachers. That is, the State has directly intervened in the professional work and activities of teachers based on the flawed assumption that teachers cannot be trusted and therefore require the intervention of the State and its agencies to ensure their performance is aligned with organisational objectives. And while one of the hallmarks of a profession and professional practice is adherence to a set of prescribed standards, performance management has rendered teachers accountable to the State, not professional peers. And, as this article outlines, this has served to de‐professionalise teaching and teachers’ work.