Suchergebnisse

In recent years, the New South Wales government education system changed the way whole-school evaluation occurs. Moving away from external school reviews when data suggested underperformance, principals are now required to develop 3-year strategic school plans and self-evaluate them in consultation with their staff, parents and students. An external validation process is then undertaken by principal peers. The internal school process presumes a stakeholder-engagement approach to school planning and evaluation. It further presumes that stakeholders are not only consulted but also feel they understand and own the plan. One school principal, realising the challenges that the new model posed for himself and his staff, engaged an evaluation team to develop and implement a process that would help his school rise to these challenges. This article describes the empowerment evaluation process that ensued. It first explains the context of the school that gave rise to empowerment over other forms of stakeholder-engagement evaluation processes. It discusses how the literature on values underpinned the conceptual framework and operational model. The article then illustrates how the process enabled the staff to engage explicitly with personal and organisational values and how a focus on these values was built into every stage of the process. Finally, the benefits as well as the challenges of this approach are described.

School reviews form part of many school systems' evaluation frameworks, most often with the dual purpose of accountability and improvement. With some modifications, such reviews also have potential as evaluation-capacity-building activities. This article demonstrates how to create evaluation capacity building by combining formative and summative evaluation in school reviews that can deliver both accountability and school improvement. Using a traditional school-review structure as a starting-point, a new school-review strategy was developed that engaged school principals as evaluators in ways that boosted evaluation capacity in their institutions. Two groups of principals were studied. From the case study that ensued it was found that principals who advised only as team members in other principals' schools primarily engaged in single-loop learning. On the other hand, principals in the second group had to understand and apply criteria in the evaluation of their own schools, design evaluation strategies and techniques, and later reflect critically on the quality of evaluation practices and capacities in order to improve the values and assumptions influencing their own practices. This group demonstrated engagement in an integrated and experiential learning cycle of experiencing, reflecting, thinking and acting, and hence double-loop learning. In other words, the enhanced capacity of this latter group of principals included new skills, knowledge and understandings that became embedded in the culture and practices of their schools. This article breaks new ground by establishing the limitations of a composite model of evaluation influence derived from current literature. Further, it uses empirical data from field trials to propose a new model that emphasises the role of catalytic values and double-loop learning in situations where leaders become transformational and formative evaluators in empowered communities of practice.