Abstract
Scholars have argued that combining supervision and evaluation is a conflict of interest that will damage the coaching process. Peer assistance and review (PAR) is an approach to the supervision and evaluation of teachers that runs counter to this argument, as the coach charged with providing professional support to a new or struggling veteran teacher also plays a formal role in that teacher’s summative personnel evaluation. This article presents data from a study of one urban school district in California as it implemented a PAR program, asking: (1) To what degree do PAR mentees trust their coaches, who conduct both formative and summative assessments? (2) How do PAR mentees who do not trust their coaches differ from those who do? Mentees’ trust in their coaches was a point and a half higher than their lack of trust in their coaches, as self-reported on a 4-point Likert scale. Those mentees who did not report a high degree of trust in their coaches were low-performing mentees.
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Notes
This is not technically accurate. While coaches by definition were not site-based, nor were they considered “officials” at the district office. They served on teacher lines, as “teachers on special assignment,” and were based out of a PAR office housed at one school.
Those participating teachers who prefer mentorship only, not evaluation by a coach, were seen to report quite differently across all constructs. With one data point—the end of the year—we have no way of knowing whether the PTs preferring mentorship only would have reported similarly at the outset of the school year, or whether their opinions developed over the year through a negative experience in PAR. The same can of course be said for other groups; perhaps some PTs reporting a preference for sole evaluation by their coach were in fact converted through a positive experience from a prior attitude against peer evaluation. It would be worthwhile for future research to assess teacher attitudes about the appropriate combination of support and evaluation at the beginning of the school year, allowing a comparison to end-of-year attitudes after involvement in PAR.
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Acknowledgments
Thank you to Robert W. Roeser for his significant assistance with the quantitative analyses presented in the article. In addition, thank you to Bruce Cooper, Patricia Holland, and Harold Wenglinsky for feedback on the manuscript.
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Goldstein, J. Debunking the Fear of Peer Review: Combining Supervision and Evaluation and Living to Tell About It. J Pers Eval Educ 18, 235–252 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-006-9022-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-006-9022-3