I t should come as no surprise that one of the most explosive issues in school communities today is that of teacher evaluation. In independent international schools, the responsibility of evaluation rests primarily with the school's administration. A sudden blip in enrolm ent or worse, a crisis surrounding one ineffective teacher, leads to calls for dismissal as well as tools for evaluation and control.
Evaluation immediately becomes a negative and threatening process to be feared by teachers.
The fact is that proper teach er evaluation can be a very helpful and positive process which provide enormous opportunities for professional development. Teachers, on the other hand, often do not have that privilege. State laws or school boards decide the focus of the evaluation. This leads teachers to distrust the evaluation process and to question the validity of the results it produces. Evaluators not spending enough time on the evaluation.