Relational Approaches to School Evaluation

School inspection based on the standardized measurement of student test performance is among the significant causes of teachers’ stress and school leaders’ frustration. To truly understand how a school provides meaningful educational experiences, it is imperative to involve the reflection of all stakeholders. Viable alternatives from a relational standpoint are now emerging, and demonstrate how school evaluation in the form of collective and mutually supportive inquiry can enrich understanding of school functioning and stimulate effective change. Among the many relevant practices, the authors focus on two relationally sensitive approaches to replace the traditional models of school inspection: first, a community-based whole-school evaluation drawing on the perspectives of teachers, parents, students, and school governors, and then and an integral evaluation practice combining the evaluative concerns of the school community and policy makers. These practices demonstrate the value of including multiple voices in the school evaluation process, thus empowering and engaging the wider community in improving schools.

Relational Evaluation in Secondary Education

Relationships are of paramount importance for adolescents whose lives are undergoing changes in many dimensions. With appropriate support and care grounded in relational processes, young people can more readily overcome disaffection and apathy. In this chapter, the authors place special emphasis on the quality of interaction and exchange among students and between students and teachers, especially when exploring and reflecting on their experiences and processes of learning. Carefully facilitated dialogic and collaborative approaches in the classroom can provide meaningful feedback on the learning tasks as well as help sustain students’ engagement in learning. Other practices such as portfolio work, learning agreements, journaling, and personal records can further nurture students’ capacity to reflect on learning, including self-evaluation and co-evaluation with peers. Likewise, learning groups and collaborative projects are excellent illustrations of how a relational orientation to evaluation can enrich students’ potential to build positive relations with others and with learning.

Toward Relation-Centered Evaluation

A relational orientation to evaluation is developed with three primary features: the first is a focus on the process of co-inquiry, where stakeholders inquire together into the student’s learning and development; the second is an emphasis on adding value to experiences of learning; and the third is the enhancement of meaningful relationships key to learning. Relational practices of evaluation should strive to foster learning, engender a sustained engagement in learning, and enrich the relational process itself. Such practices can be embedded within the ongoing learning processes, especially through dialogue and collaboration among co-learners. Equally, evaluative reflection may take place at specified intervals, such as once a term. Here students acquire a vocabulary of evaluation and appreciation that can be incorporated into the future learning journeys. Co-inquiry involves a generative process in which mutual valuing is prominent. Such evaluative reflection should ultimately be extended to the whole school as a learning community and beyond.

Beyond the Tyranny of Testing

This book starts by highlighting the different purposes of evaluation in education, including its contribution to student learning, teachers’ professional development, the school community’s progress, and the informed participation of parents and other stakeholders. However, largely owing to the current educational system that structures schools as factories, the pursuit of these goals has led to increased reliance on assessment devices such as exams, grades, and high-stakes testing. Functioning as a form of quality control, such practices now dominate the schooling process. Students are tested more than ever before, teachers and schools undergo measurement on a continuing basis, and nations compete for places on international league tables. The result is student test performance becoming the only aim of education, turning the measurement into the goal itself. Furthermore, standardization as such masks individual potential and suppresses creativity. Combined with mounting stress on students, teachers, and school leaders, alternatives to assessment must be sought.

Relational Evaluation in Primary Education

Relationships are especially important in childhood and hence in primary education. There are already ground-breaking practices of evaluation in primary classrooms that illustrate how relational approaches can support children’s learning and well-being. These practices often involve dialogue, reflective questioning, peer collaboration, and mutual appreciation in effectively providing formative feedback on children’s classroom learning experiences. This chapter also selects examples, including circle time reflection, dialogic inquiry, learning review meetings, and project exhibitions, as key practices for inspiring and enhancing children’s continued engagement in learning. The authors reflect and analyze the multiple ways in which sensitive and caring evaluation can take place within generative processes of relating and which in turn enrich the myriad relationships so central to learning.

Education as Relational Process

Replacing the assessment orientation requires an alternative to the idea of schools as sites of production. To do so, the authors challenge the conception of schools as composed of individual actors whose performance can be measured independently of their lodgment in the social world. They argue that our understandings of the world, along with our ways of life, come about within a process of relating. It is out of coordination among participants that beliefs, values, and meaningfulness of actions originate. Thus the process of co-creation is essential to knowledge, understanding, and learning. Significant distinctions are drawn among various forms of relational process, with contrasts between conventional conversations (valuable in sustaining tradition) degenerative interchange (leading to the destruction of meaning-making) and generative relating (that inspires innovation and enriches relationship). Measurement-based assessment practices in education foster alienation, suspicion, self-centeredness, and an instrumental orientation to relating. Vitally needed is the development of a relationally enriching orientation to evaluation.

Toward Systemic Transformation in Education

In this conclusion, the authors consider steps toward systemic transformation in education. They offer proposals for relation-enriching actions in the classroom, the whole school, the community, higher education institutions, and beyond. In the classroom, the authors emphasize the art of inquiring, the art of listening, the art of appreciation, and the art of disagreeing; in the whole school, they advocate a relational ethos and the development of a culture of inquiry and collaboration, participative decision-making, and relational responsibility; in the community, they propose that parents should be co-learners and co-authors of the educational narrative and that neighborhood institutions should serve as school’s learning partners; in the case of higher education institutions, the authors stress these institutions’ role in expanding students’ learning and supporting teachers’ professional development. Finally, the authors point out that a systemic transformation in education invites a globally shared inquiry into new ways living together.

Relational Evaluation and Educational Transformation

Practices of dialogue, collaboration, and participatory action appear with increasing frequency across the landscape of contemporary education. Of particular significance is their presence in emerging practices of curriculum design and pedagogy. In this chapter the authors first explore the close relationship of these developments to relational evaluation. Uniting relationally sensitive practices across these three domains would pave the way to a major transformation in education. Objections to practices of relational evaluation are then addressed, including such issues as time constraints, rigor, standards, and the need for gateways to higher education. Finally we touch on two major movements in cultural life on which the possibilities of educational transformation will depend. Impeding educational change are the creeping forces of market driven visions of organizational functioning. In contrast are the consequences of major innovations in information and communication technology. Here we find the unleashing of enormous learning potential. Such developments invite the full flourishing of a relational orientation to education.

Relational Approaches to Evaluating Teaching

A central purpose of evaluating teaching is to help teachers develop professionally. In contrast to traditional teachers’ appraisal and teachers’ performance management, relational approaches can overcome the current impasse where student test scores are used to judge teachers. Such practices undermine teachers’ confidence and professionalism and foster alienation from each other and from teaching itself. As a relational alternative, the authors propose a fourfold framework, centering on practices of mutual learning among teachers, inviting students as learning partners, cultivating teacher strengths and talents, and developing teachers’ research into their own practices. The authors show how relationally enriched approaches to evaluating teaching can inject creative energy into the teaching process while simultaneously supporting teachers’ learning. Evaluation can thus be integral to teachers’ professional development.