TRAINING FOR COMPETENCE BASED LESSON OBSERVATION AND EVALUATION OF TEACHING

Based on the cross-sectional view of teacher competences (in relation to student, teaching process and teacher personality) as well as the current approaches to teacher competence assessment, the team of the researchers from Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra (Slovakia) involved in the project APVV-14-0446 Assessment of Teacher Competences has developed an innovative approach to assessing teacher professional competences and relevant to it tools of their evaluation.

The innovation of the approach is expressed in the way how the assessor evaluates the teacher; it is not the commonly used overall assessment of teacher's performance based on relative shallow and surface lesson observation, but each time the observation focuses on deep understanding of various nuances, application in teaching, and evaluation of just one of the identified 10 key professional competences of teachers. For the assessment of these competences the research team has developed 10 assessment sheets for evaluators and 10 self-assessment sheets for the observed (assessed) teachers, and 10 drafts (with about 10-15 questions) for the interview of the assessor with the assessed teacher after the lesson observation was completed and both sheets (the assessment and self-assessment ones) were compared. These are somewhat known procedures (the use of observation sheets), but in this approach they are specific, because their content is more specified as it focuses just on one competence and even more, not only assessor's view is recorded and presented but it is compared with the observed teacher's view on what was going on in the class with the following obligatory interview of the assessor with the assessed teacher.

It is therefore important to prepare teachers for this new approach to their assessment, being it part of their pre-service or in-service training. For this purpose a textbook based on the concept of evaluating individual teacher competences was developed and published using a conceptual analysis of the lesson or part of it. Assessing the teacher's competences by means of a conceptual analysis is based on a comparison of the observed actual (or proposed) course of teaching with its hypothetically better alternatives. The team members analyzed the specific sample (model situation) based on three methodological steps - annotation, analysis, alteration, so called AAA methodology.

The paper provides a more detailed description of this concept and provides examples of the training assignments that have been created.