Towards a Better Future

Chapter One: Teaching and Learning
practice, can yield. As touched on earlier, the important thing to stress is that the primary benefits
of evaluation arise when evaluation itself is constructively and insightfully embodied in the everyday
work of educational practitioners themselves. ‘Practitioners’ in this wider sense include not only
teachers and school leaders, but also inspectors, researchers, professionals in the support services,
managerial bodies and associations, statutory agencies in education, and so on. This is not, it should
be stressed, a matter of widening the range of approaches in order to have more effective as distinct
from less effective forms of evaluation. The very notion of ‘effectiveness’, for all its prominence in
the research and policy literature on education, fails to capture the heart of what is involved in the
evaluation of learning and teaching. If the various kinds of practitioners involved in education
understand evaluation primarily in terms of effectiveness, then the best insights that evaluation itself
has to offer may be largely bypassed. No more can one capture the core of the matter in this restricted
way than can a drama critic review a play based on the playwright’s text alone.
To suggest that evaluation needs to be embodied
constructively and insightfully in the actions of
practitioners means that the practitioners have
to become their own most capable and
perceptive critics. Evaluation thus understood is
hospitable to what the DES promotes as school
self-evaluation, and is conceived as a cooperative
or team endeavour, not as an exercise
in compliance, or individual display. It is what is
properly referred to by the phrase ‘reflective
practitioner’, and it lies at the heart of teacher
education – both in its initial and professional
development modes. The latter now includes the
“
…the primary benefits of
evaluation arise when
evaluation itself is constructively
and insightfully embodied
in the everyday work of
educational practitioners
themselves.
”
induction phase that is currently expanding as Droichead (See Chapters 8 and 9). Where the education
of teachers involves them habitually in analysing and reviewing the collateral as well as the more
explicit dimensions of learning in their classrooms, evaluation becomes quite naturally an integral
part of the work of teaching itself. Familiarity with criteria of excellence in appraising the
consequences of different kinds of pedagogical actions can be systematically cultivated here, handin-hand
with a capacity to provide regular, informed feedback to students.
The benefits of such forms of teacher education go far beyond the domain of skills, and become
manifest in the teacher’s ethical orientation and sense of professional identity. Accordingly, a range
of worthy human qualities also comes actively into play in the learning experiences of teachers
themselves, whether as newcomers or practitioners that are more experienced. Examples of these
qualities, all of which involve a refined exercise of judgement, include sensitivity to interpersonal
dynamics – in both classroom and staffroom; a keen ethical awareness where differences in outlook
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