Extended review : Teacher Evaluation: Educative Alternatives [book review]

Abstract

This is an intellectually satisfying and pedagogically practical text on teacher evaluation. Noting the tendency to use concern about education to evaluate teachers' work in ways that are divorced from the understanding and experience of teachers and pupils, Gitlin and Smyth correctly start with an informed critique of current evaluative practices. In accepting external evaluation many teachers and pupils do not use internal inquiry and reflective self-evaluation. They become more concerned with meeting 'minimalist standards of outside experts' (p. viii). The movement away from impositional modes of teacher evaluation to the two alternative 'educative' forms proposed in this text, is based on a just and liberating contestation of the dominant impositional mode. Gitlin and Smyth make a sustained case against this mode, which whilst oppressing teachers does not challenge current (and often conservative) methods and aims of education practice.