The practice of teachers’ performance appraisal in secondary schools of metekel zone

Abstract

The major purpose of this research was to assess the practice of teacher performance appraisal whether or not it was serving as a means of effective teacher performance managements approach and to identify the major challenging problems. Proposing possible solutions which will help the schools to improve their practice was also the concern of this study. In doing so, six basic questions which helped the researcher to assess practice of teacher performance appraisal and to identify the major problems were formulated. To conduct this research descriptive survey research design was employed as the study covered large area. Again, quantitative and qualitative research methods giving more emphasis to quantitative one were used in conducting this research. The study was delimited to only ten randomly selected secondary schools of the zone. For collecting necessary data for this research, 10 principals, 10 vive principals, 50 students who were usually involved in teacher performance appraisal and 50 PTA members of the sample secondary schools were selected using purposive sampling technique. Whereas, 85 teachers and 40 department head teachers were selected as respondents by using lottery method of simple random sampling technique. The researcher has used questionnaire consisting of both close-ended and open-ended questions to gather data from principal, vice principal, department head teachers and teacher respondents and FGD was conducted among sample students as well as PTA respondents. In addition, the important documents related to teacher performance appraisal practice and implementations were consulted. The data collected using close-ended questions of the questionnaire were analyzed mainly using quantitative data analysis method. In doing so, frequency and percentage were used. Chi-square test was used to test the presence of significant statistical difference between responses of two respondent groups. But the responses obtained through open-ended questions of the questionnaire, FGD and results of document analysis were analyzed qualitatively for the sake of validating and triangulating the quantitatively analyzed data. Accordingly, the finding of the research has indicated that teacher performance appraisal in secondary schools of the study area was poorly practiced due to problem in its design, the purpose it was served, negative perception of practitioners, lack of pre-appraisal meetings, classroom observation, feedback and discussion, lack of necessary skill and knowledge of appraisers, unable to use relevant information in appraising teachers and generally inconsistency of the practice. Therefore, the issue of planning, assigning students who are going to appraise teachers at the beginning of academic year, practicing consistent and ongoing classroom observation, designing consistent feedback system, providing trainings for appraisers, creating awareness on both appraisers and appraisees, developing comprehensive appraisal criteria which includes all school programs, involving peers in teacher performance appraisal and using self appraisal as one source of performance information are recommended by the researcher for secondary schools of the study area to practice.