Abstract:

The school system reforms, started in recent years in European Union, have identified in teacher evaluation the crucial factor to improve the quality of formative processes. Thus, the acknowledgement of merit, the encouragement reward, the motivation of responsibility are directly linked to the identification and implementation of an efficient and reliable evaluation system.

Most of European countries adopt a process of school evaluation that in many cases also includes teaching assessment of teachers. In the European Union the different types are gather together in five models: individual assessment carried out by supervisors; individual assessment carried out by supervisors and head teacher; individual assessment conducted by head teacher; self-assessment and evaluation of the single school that incorporates the total assessment of its school team; evaluation of schools and individual teachers by a plurality of subjects. To this day, in Italy there isn’t a regulatory framework that defines who evaluates the teacher performance’s and, especially, what is evaluated; the connection between the assessment quality of teaching and student learning outcomes (the results of the school system founded on the teaching performance of teachers), was characterized by a particular course that, only in recent years, has become central in the political discussion. The pressure groups (of the trade unions, but not only) are numerous, and they obstruct the identification of a solution or, anyway, the start of a serious change process.

In this paper, some reasons and difficulties emerging from the debate on the teacher evaluation in Italy will be revised: the aim is to provide a complete frame of the many unresolved problems and current research directions (through the analysis of the regulatory framework, of the experiments that were carried out and those currently in progress). In the last part, it proposes a possible model, according to a multidimensional approach, to highlight the potential coordinates of reference of a national system for quality assessment of teaching.

Keywords:

Teacher evaluation, teaching quality, accountability, school policy.