Key points to solve the evaluation problem of primary and secondary school teachers

　　Teacher evaluation is an effective means to promote teachers’ development and improve teaching quality, and an important way to identify teachers, rationally allocate teachers’ resources and effectively manage teachers. Schools play a key role in encouraging teachers in primary and secondary schools and ensuring the quality of education and teaching. We must reverse the unscientific teacher evaluation orientation and get rid of the "stubborn disease" of "only grades, only studies, only diplomas, only papers and only hats".

　　In our research, we found that there are the following reasons for the problem of teacher evaluation.

　　The evaluation index is only score, only entrance examination.

　　Under the evaluation ecology of "schools focus on scores, parents look at scores, and society compares scores", schools simply evaluate primary and secondary school teachers by students’ enrollment rate and test scores, and quality education has become a beautiful ornament. The evaluation indicators pay little attention to the key and process links of teaching such as teachers’ morality, teachers’ teaching, classroom management, curriculum design, teaching plan, improvement of students’ comprehensive quality, teachers’ ability, teachers’ performance and professional development. Even if some schools have these indicators, there are formalism or indicators with low weight and dispensability.

　　Machinery with simple evaluation method

　　The evaluation work mainly depends on administrative power and external pressure, and it works from top to bottom. The evaluation plan has a strong administrative color and is mostly formulated by school leaders and even education authorities. The evaluation form is single, the evaluation object is single, and the evaluation feedback mechanism is single. The evaluation results simply divide teachers into three grades, pay attention to the horizontal comparison between teachers, and pay little attention to the vertical teaching performance and progress of teachers. Some schools implement the elimination system at the bottom, which has seriously dampened teachers’ enthusiasm for teaching. Some schools have not formally fed back the evaluation results to teachers to help them get effective information to improve education and teaching.

　　Lack of subjectivity of teachers’ participation in evaluation

　　Teachers lack the basic rights to participate, to speak, to make decisions and to know, and schools and teachers are unreasonably placed on the opposite sides of "evaluation" and "being evaluated", which causes teachers to pay little attention to and care about evaluation, showing their initiative "absence" and "aphasia", which is not conducive to mobilizing teachers’ enthusiasm for improving teaching and participating in management.

　　The evaluation results are too utilitarian.

　　The evaluation results are mainly used in year-end assessment, teachers’ performance pay, personnel decision-making, professional title evaluation, teaching achievement test, management and so on. The utilitarian evaluation makes the front-line teachers most concerned about the correlation between teacher evaluation and professional title evaluation. The evaluation conditions of professional titles deviate from teaching, and the status of papers is elevated, which leads to the wrong orientation of teaching work and the tendency of "only papers", and teaching work is becoming more and more utilitarian.

　　It is an important proposition to solve the key points of outstanding evaluation problems and build a scientific and reasonable evaluation system for primary and secondary school teachers in the new era. We can start the reform from the following aspects.

　　Teacher evaluation returns to teaching and classroom.

　　It is necessary to establish an evaluation system that separates teaching from administrative management to ensure that teachers really spend most of their time on education and teaching and on students. In view of the outstanding problems such as more inspections and evaluations, we will comprehensively clean up and standardize all kinds of inspection, assessment and evaluation activities in schools, and implement a directory list system to free teachers from "uncles" and "cousins". Make full use of information technology and big data platform to automatically retrieve the data to reduce the number and content of repeated reporting.

　　Establish a participatory teacher evaluation system

　　Let the front-line teachers participate, increase the transparency of the teacher evaluation process, increase the benign interaction between teachers, and learn from each other for improvement. Improve the teacher participation mechanism in the development of evaluation indicators, ensure that the indicators are scientific and reasonable, so that every teacher can accurately understand the connotation and work requirements of evaluation indicators, and increase the interaction between teachers and evaluation indicators. Only when the evaluation is regarded as "with you" rather than "for you" will the teacher evaluation appear natural, open and fair, and be easily accepted and implemented by teachers.

　　Strengthen the process evaluation of teaching performance

　　By establishing an institutionalized and standardized framework, we can provide all kinds of necessary support and help for teachers, improve their professional ability and level, and finally achieve the goal of promoting students’ all-round development. When a teacher joins the job, the school should help him to make a career development plan, and make a feasible goal plan based on the overall development goals of the school and disciplines and the teachers’ personal academic expertise. Pay attention to the progress of teaching and scientific research, put forward countermeasures and improve them in time when problems are found. Improve the relevance and consistency of the process evaluation and the school’s annual teaching assessment, annual scientific research assessment, post appointment assessment, professional title promotion assessment and other assessment systems, and conduct a comprehensive inspection and evaluation of the set goals.

　　Optimize the feedback mechanism of teacher evaluation

　　Establish an all-round evaluation and feedback system. Principal feedback should be more related to teachers’ characteristics and professional development, provide feedback on teachers’ advantages and development potential, and promote teachers’ professional development. The evaluation of academic colleagues can rely on the wisdom and experience of the academic community, so that teachers can fully realize their own strengths and weaknesses and make clear the direction of their efforts, but they should strive to be standardized and fair. Self-evaluation is conducive to teachers’ self-reflection, making teachers change from passive acceptance of evaluation to active reflection, and making evaluation a "booster" for teachers’ professional development.

　　Establish a normal channel for teachers’ complaints

　　When teachers don’t agree with or are not satisfied with the evaluation results, they should know that they can express their opinions and suggestions through normal channels. Through the appeal channel, teachers’ reasonable demands can be expressed, a school cultural atmosphere of trust and cooperation can be formed, and the teacher evaluation mechanism can be improved. Give full play to the role of teachers’ trade unions, so as to prevent teachers from having negative emotions when they think there is unfair treatment, and their teaching enthusiasm will be dampened and hit, and their work will be in a negative state. Schools should actively invite teachers to participate in the evaluation, eliminate negative emotions in time, and prevent the occurrence of teacher group incidents.

　　Strengthen the autonomy of school evaluation teachers

　　The "county-oriented" compulsory education management system has changed the division of power in the education system, and the teacher’s power is gradually controlled by the county-level government or the education department. The superior management department can’t know the teacher’s education and teaching situation in time and accurately, and it is difficult for the school to strictly manage the teachers and establish an effective teacher incentive mechanism. Different schools, because of their differences in community environment, students’ socio-economic background and students’ characteristics, make teachers’ teaching work focus and pertinence have certain differences. This requires schools to deeply understand classroom teaching practice, find the key to evaluate teachers, and establish a teacher evaluation system suitable for their own schools. The greater the autonomy of the school, the more objective it is to evaluate teachers, formulate scientific and reasonable classroom evaluation standards, and the easier it is for teachers to accept evaluation and actively improve teaching work.

　　(Author: National Education Development Research Center)