1. Evaluating and rewarding
teachers – the prospects of
the Valorizza experiment
Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Centre for Educational
Research and Innovation - OECD

2. Introductory comments
• Improving teacher quality is the most successful
route to building high-quality education systems
– Attracting and retaining good teachers
– Supporting the professionalisation of teachers
– Motivating teachers
– Involving teachers in educational reform
• Evaluation, appraisal and feedback are key
features of professionalisation
• Their ultimate function is to create a knowledge-
rich environment for teachers
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3. Introductory comments
• Evaluation of teachers serves many purposes
– Rewarding excellence in the profession
– Stimulating improvement
– Supporting professional standards of excellence
– Demonstrating public accountability
– Identifying underperforming teachers
– Fostering professional development, coaching,
effective supervision and collegial intervision
• All leading, of course, to improved student
learning and achievement
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4. Insights from TALIS 2008
• Most teachers welcome evaluation, appraisal
and feedback and would like to receive more
• Too many teachers still do not receive adequate
appraisal and feedback
• Evaluation and appraisal too often do not lead to
effective consequences
• Teachers receiving feedback generally feel more
effective, have greater job satisfaction and
engage in professional improvement activities
• School leaders are not investing enough in
adequate appraisal
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5. Insights from TALIS 2008
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6. Designing effective teacher evaluation
• Critical conditions for teacher evaluation to be
effective
– Needs to be in line with other policies sustaining
their professionalisation:
• recruitment, selection, training, induction,
professional development, remuneration,
incentives, …
– Balancing improvement and accountability
– Needs to be seen by teachers as fair, firmly based
in the profession, evidence-based
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7. Designing effective teacher evaluation
• Possible methods and sources of evidence:
– Classroom observation
– Objective setting and individual interviews
– Self-evaluation
– Teacher portfolio
– Standardised forms to record performance
– Teacher testing
– Surveys of students and parents
– Use of student achievement data
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8. Designing effective teacher evaluation
• Evaluators
– Need to be perceived as competent, trustworthy
– Preferably should have a training in evaluation
• External use of evaluation results:
– Rewarding excellence
– Career advancement
– Sanctions for poorly performing teachers
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9. The Valorizza experiment
• The Valorizza experiment is a most valuable
contribution to the international experience in
teacher evaluation
– Following established good practice
– Introducing some original elements
– Sometimes also departing from the mainstream
practice
• The use of ‘reputation’ as evidence
• Relying on peer judgment rather than extensive
documented evidence
• School-based rather than standards based
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10. Reputation
• In educational evaluation reputation is a
contested concept
– Still widely used, for example in university
rankings
• Two contrasting views
– Reputation measurement ultimately is not much
more than a ‘popularity poll’
– Peers, supervisors and parents have a fairly
accurate view of the actual quality of teachers and
reputation thus is a trustworthy proxy for quality
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11. Reputation
• Convergence of reputation indicators across
different communities is a key validity measure
• Time factor in reputation is important
– Building a high reputation takes time
– Losing a reputation can go fast
– Time-lag in reputation should not work against
innovative teachers
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12. Peer judgment
• Evaluation of professional practice should
always be based on the principle of ‘peer review’
and should be as much as possible ‘evidence-
based’
– The evidence collected should not automatically
lead to a judgment but is mediated by the review
by peers
– Evaluation can never be completely ‘objective’,
but involves ‘inter-subjective’ judgment by well-
informed peers
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13. Peer judgment
– Evaluation should be evidence-based but should
not necessarily involve huge amounts of data;
keep it practical and as simple as possible
– In complex and information-rich environments a
judgment inevitably reduces the complexity to
essentially very simple decisions
– The evaluators making the judgment should be
trusted as competent to do so
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14. School-based
• In contrast to many teacher evaluation schemes,
the Valorizza experiment is very much school-
based
– Other systems prefer standards-based assessment
where every teacher is evaluated on equal
grounds against general standards
– A school-based approach has many merits though
• Strengthening the school as a professional
community of practice
• Taking into account the specific contextual
conditions in which teachers have to perform
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15. School-based
• Still, it would make sense to try to link the
teacher evaluation more explicitly to agreed
standards of excellence in professional practice,
while still allowing variation to conform to
school specificities and local contexts
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16. Conclusion
• The Valorizza experiment definitely is a very interesting
new development and deserves a second round
• Its main contributions are situated in
– The methodological sound use of reputation
– The judgment by peers based on a cross-community
evidence base
– Its school-based design
• It could improve on
– The use of professional standards as reference of
good practice
– The feedback to teachers
– A need to take into consideration the relation
between teacher evaluation and innovation.
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17. Thank you !
dirk.vandamme@oecd.org
www.oecd.org/edu/ceri
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