• On an individual level, teachers report that receiving appraisal and feedback increases their job satisfaction, influences their teaching practices, and is useful for their development as teachers.
• Most teachers work in schools that do not penalise underperforming teachers. Almost three-quarters of teachers reported that, in their schools, teachers would not be dismissed because of sustained poor performance.

Significance

Evaluation can play a key role in school improvement and teacher development. Providing feedback can aid teachers in better understanding their respective strengths and weaknesses, which can be an important first step towards improving teaching.

Findings

A third or more of teachers in Austria, Ireland and Portugal worked in schools whose school principal reported no internal or external school evaluations in the previous five years. This was also the case for around a quarter of teachers in Denmark and Spain and around a fifth in Italy. By contrast, in 14 countries (Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Korea, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia and Turkey), at least half of tea-chers worked in schools whose school principal reported at least an annual school evaluation (either an external evaluation or a school self-evaluation).

Teachers' appraisal and feedback are rarely associated with material incentives, and in most countries they are not substantially linked either to financial benefits or career advancement. Across all countries, just 9% of teachers reported that appraisal or feedback had a moderate or large impact upon their salary and 11% reported that it had a moderate or large impact on a financial bonus or another kind of monetary reward.

Non-material incentives also appear to be relatively infrequent: Slightly more than a third of teachers said their appraisal and feedback had led to a moderate or large change in the recognition they received from their school principal and/or colleagues within the school, while just under a quarter said it had led to a moderate or a large change in their opportunities for professional development.

Teachers who did receive appraisal and feedback had a positive view of the process. Overall, such teachers considered the appraisal and feedback they received to be a fair assessment of their work and to have had a positive impact upon their job satisfaction (see Table D5.4 in Education at a Glance 2009). This is an important finding given the negative connotations that may be associated with the introduction of a teacher appraisal system.

But while teachers may have found individual benefits from systems of appraisal and feedback, they felt that overall such systems did not recognise teachers' efforts and successes, reward effective teachers and effective teaching practices, or provide incentives to teachers. On the other hand, did teachers think that poor teaching was being punished? Again, the answer is broadly no: In most countries most teachers reported that sustained poor performance would not lead to dismissal, while more than three-quarters of tea-chers reported that their school principal did not take steps to alter the monetary rewards of a persistently underperforming teacher.

Definitions

See introduction to this section.

Further reading from OECD

Creating Effective Teaching and Learning Environments: First Results from TALIS (2009).