Teachers’ Responses to Changes in Teacher Evaluation Policy in Korea and the United States

Abstract

There is a strong body of research that indicates that teacher quality has a stronger effect on student learning than any other school-based factor. At the same time, most teacher evaluation systems have traditionally failed to distinguish among different levels of teacher effectiveness or to link evaluation results to professional development in meaningful ways. In this chapter, we compare teacher responses in S. Korea and the United States to evaluation policies. We provide initial evidence that teachers and principals in Seoul defined “effective teachers” as those who helped manage their schools in areas such as affairs/planning, curriculum/instruction, science and technology, discipline, and extra-curricular activities. In contrast, the Michigan teachers and principals in the study were more likely to view effective teachers as those who planned instruction to meet student needs and provided evidence of student engagement and learning. In addition, educators’ notions of effective teachers seemed related to their responses to new teacher evaluation policies. In particular, the teachers in Seoul strongly resisted the new teacher evaluation policies while their counterparts in Michigan either supported the new evaluation policies or at least did not actively resist them. These differences seemed related to regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive elements associated with the teacher evaluation policies in the jurisdictions where the teachers and principals worked.

Citation

Youngs, P., Kim, J. and Pippin, J. (2015), "Teachers’ Responses to Changes in Teacher Evaluation Policy in Korea and the United States", Promoting and Sustaining a Quality Teacher Workforce (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 27), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 413-442. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-367920140000027011