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Article Excerpt
Appraisal of practice teaching lessons is an important vehicle for informing the student teacher about accomplishments and prospects in teaching. It is for this reason that learning to teach from practice lessons is at the core of student teacher preparation programs (Abernathy, Forsyth & Mitchell, 2001; Furlong & Maynard, 1995). One of the key elements in learning to become a teacher is sharing and learning from experiences in close cooperation with practice teachers and teacher educators (Dall' Alba & Sandberg, 2006; Day, 1999; Edwards, Gilroy & Hartley, 2002). Teacher educators, student teachers, and practice teachers are all involved in this process in different ways. Whereas teacher educators seem more inclined to look at a student teacher's practice teaching from the perspective of program standards, and teacher mentors look at a student teacher's classroom performance and how it benefits pupils, the student teacher (as a learner) is more concerned with coping with the direct demands of teaching a class (Loughran, 2003, 2007; Grossman, 2006). It is important to gauge how these different perspectives can merge in an appraisal for supporting and stimulating a student teacher's learning and, more specifically, to determine how different stakeholders operate and appraise teaching practice lessons and how the assessment is understood by those involved in this assessment-for-learning process (Havnes & McDowell, 2007).
Assessment for Learning to Teach
Assessment is increasingly recognized as a valuable tool to promote learning (Assessment Reform Group, 1999, 2002; Black & Wiliam, 1998; Shephard, 2000). This learning-oriented, (in)formative assessment--that is, in the sense that formative assessment should be informative to the learner--needs to be distinguished from a summary or mandated assessment, which documents and appraises work performance in relation to external evaluation standards (Delandshere & Arens, 2003). Assessment in the latter instance focuses on establishment of marked achievements that may be appreciated and judged according to preestablished standards (Zuzowsky & Libman, 2002; Heilbronn, Jones, Bubb, & Totterdell, 2002). As such, it has its own legitimized function in teacher education (i.e., serving an accountability warrant; Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2002).
Formative assessment, however, tries to document and illuminate the cyclical and extended process of professional growth and the building of relevant practice experiences (McMillan, 2007; MacLelland, 2004). This occurs through continuous monitoring across an extended period and is mainly aimed at student-oriented goals and individual learning needs (Edwards & Collison, 1996; Wang & Odell, 2002). Viewed this way, assessment aims at providing (in)formative feedback to help the student teacher gain insight into performance so that it is valuable to his or her professional growth (Boshuizen, Bromme, & Gruber, 2004; Brown & Glasner, 1999). Thus, assessment information is collected and communicated for its potential to change or direct the (student) teacher's development (Feiman Nemser & Remillard, 1996). Several framing factors have been identified (Kwakman, 2003; Smith & Tillema, 2003; Tigelaar, Dolmans, Wolfhagen, & van der Vleuten, 2002) that directly relate to the impact of assessment information on professional learning, for instance, type of assessment evidence collected, criteria used with respect to performance appraisal, or whether a relational or situational approach to feedback delivery is used (Tillema & Smith, 2003). These framing factors may variously affect what is acquired from practice experiences by the student teacher.
To complicate matters further, typically, several stakeholders are involved in assessment of learning to teach; they either implicitly or explicitly use these framing factors differently. These include mentor or practice teachers from practice schools, supervisors from teacher education institutes, and as is more often the case, (peer) student teachers (Darling Hammond, 2000; Wilson & Berne, 1999). Assessment in this case is a complex process of joint appraisal and judgment. Several framing factors play an intricate role in this process. It includes not just several assessors and their rating of practice teaching, but different assessment targets or goals may compete as well, along with various appraisal criteria, sources of performance evidence, and diverse intents to deliver informative feedback. A simple model of the isolated, impartial assessor who grades performance undisputed, on mutually accepted criteria, does not correspond to reality (Snyder, Lippincott, & Bower, 1998; Zeichner & Wray, 2000). Instead, several studies indicate that the different stakeholders hold a wide variety of perspectives on appraising student teachers during practice teaching (Atwater & Brett, 2005; Tillema & Smith, 2006; Wilson & Youngs, 2005; Zuzowksy & Libman, 2002). Mentoring practice teachers and supervising teacher educators differ in appreciation of teaching preparation and contents addressed in teacher education programs (Edwards et al., 2002), in mentoring approaches adopted for practice teaching (Loughran, 2003; Nijveldt, 2007), and in applying criteria for successful teaching (Wang & Odell, 2002; Yinger & Hendriksen-Lee, 2003). Even student teachers disagree with their mentors and supervisors on the amount of support they need to regulate their own learning (Kremer Hayon & Tillema, 1999) or the feedback they need for learning to teach (Zeichner & Wray, 2000).
This variety of perspectives need not necessarily be detrimental to a valid and (in)formative appraisal. On the contrary, a multirater or multiple-perspective viewpoint may even enhance such an appraisal, because it can enrich the nature of informative feedback given to the learner (Atwater & Brett, 2005; Byham, 1996; Thornow, 1993; Darling Hammond & Bransford, 2004). Multirater assessments, such as 360-degree feedback (Waldman & Atwater, 1998), have been successfully used, for instance, in workplace learning and performance appraisal to provide an in-depth and multidimensional view on acquired expertise in practice settings (Boshuizen et al., 2004; Dall' Alba & Sandberg, 2006; Kirby, Knapper, Evans, Carty, & Gadula, 2003).
Shared appraisal is now being widely adopted in work-related settings in many professional fields (i.e., nursing, hospitality management; Baum, 2002). As an assessment tool, this multirater assessment has been found to motivate learning, augment follow-up on feedback recommendations, and advance favorable attitudes toward the improvement of future performance (Jellema, 2003; Maurer, Mitchell, & Barbeite, 2002). Appreciation of multirater assessment predominantly derives from the recognition that no single source in the appraisal of performance has ultimate legitimacy or warranty (Byham, 1996; Cochran Smith & Fries, 2002; Shephard, 2000). Moreover, to arrive at a balanced and multidimensional weighting of the many-faceted nature of professional expertise (Ericsson, 1996), a combined overview of several dimensions in appraisal is needed. Multiperspective assessment in mentored learning and in tutorial relations may have been undervalued in teacher education. What has been stressed is assessment that supports a single, conclusive, if not summary, rating (Cochran Smith & Fries, 2002; Ben Peretz, 2001). But receiving feedback from multiple perspectives, even to the extent that it entails descriptive, judgmental assessment information, can indeed foster the learning process of beginning professionals (Tillema & Smith, 2006; Loughran, 2007). Certainly, relations among mentors, supervisors, and student teachers should be conceived primarily as learning partnerships (Baxter Magolda, 2004; Edwards et al., 2002). Therefore, bringing in multiple perspectives from different sources to provide informative feedback (by peers, supervisors, and teachers) can help the student teacher in various aspects of his or her performance.
Appraisal Processes With Multiple Raters
It is no small matter to organize such a concerted, fine-tuned arrangement of a multiperspective assessment (Gijbels, Watering, Dochy, & Van den Bossche, 2005; Lievens, 1998). First it is important to acknowledge which framing factors may cause divergence or variance in shared appraisals. It can be maintained that, when not explicated and shared, these framing factors may cause variance in orientation to the appraisal task among assessors and should therefore be scrutinized in a multirater appraisal. As a framework to review appraisal processes, the following framing factors can be identified (Falchikov, 2005; Smith & Tillema, 2003; Tigelaar et al., 2002; Topping, 1998; Zeichner & Wray, 2000):
(a) the purpose of bringing together assessment information (the nature of the information to be collected), that is, why, for what purpose?
(b) the object of evidenced assessment information (the practice teaching performance), that is, what is being appraised?
(c) the way evidence is appraised (the type of information that will be regarded as relevant), that is, what counts as evidence?
(d) the focus on further development (the support for learning that an assessor is willing to provide or the mentoring orientation involved), that is, is the information informative to the learner?
(e) the criteria by which performance is appraised (i.e., the standards used to evaluate what...
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