Is it time to move performance appraisal away from individual teachers, to a collective target across an organisation?
There will be thousands of teachers up and down the country, currently justifying their performance in their annual review meetings, explaining why and providing reams and reams of evidence to demonstrate why they deserve a pay-rise. This is like walking down a dead-end Cul-de-sac in the current climate of school funding ...
Do you know when to quit?
I've been reading The Dip by
There is another solution, which we implemented for several years at the school where I was a governor. The law requires schools to link pay progression to performance, but you can define ‘performance’ however you like. We simply said that every teacher would move up the pay scale unless there were serious concerns about their teaching. This avoids the need to offer pay progression if you find yourself with an obviously weak teacher, while still keeping all the benefits of predictable (i.e. not performance-related) pay progression.
Remember that it isn’t just that performance-related pay doesn’t improve student outcomes. There is plenty of evidence suggesting that performance-related pay actually **harms performance.** There’s a great 10minute summary of this evidence by Professor Daniel Ariely here on Vimeo:
Team performance targets might work, as you suggest, but you do have a potentially very difficult problem arising if you have an obviously weak teacher on a team which has met the team target. That weak teacher would still get pay progression. Is that fair on the rest of the team?
Hi Bruce – you make many valid points. Thanks for reading and commenting. Yes, re. defining “performance”. Most schools do, do the ‘we are happy unless serious concerns’. Thanks for the video – I will watch this. Again, re. team performance… the key would be to identify any weaknesses and tackle these before and at the final review so that there are no surprises. The team ethos will soon disappear if people know the weak link isn’t being tackled.
Interested to hear that most schools follow the ‘happy unless serious concerns’ model. I’m pretty sure we were the only maintained school doing that in our LEA area (Hampshire), everyone else used the LEA’s model pay policy which has all the ‘one point for acceptable, two for good, three for exceptional’ performance descriptors. I know we were unusual because HT and I had to attend a union consultation meeting because we were deviating from the local model policy … even though we were effectively doing what unions had been pushing for nationally anyway.
(PS Mistakenly attributed video above to Daniel Ariely. It is by Daniel Pink, not Daniel Ariely. Ariely does a lot of the research in this area, Pink wrote a book about it)
I recall seeing that video in the past – but will watch more closely this time. Yes, to some following past policies – think research schools are leading the way here for an alternative to appraisal.
FWIW I wrote up a short summary of the experimental research looking at what happens when you link pay to performance:
http://www.schoolstaffsurveys.com/does-performance-related-pay-work-for-teachers