Education Commons^™

U.S. Principals' Interpretation And Implementation Of Teacher Evaluation Policies, David B. Reid

The Qualitative Report

In the United States policymakers, states, and researchers are increasingly reliant on teacher evaluations as a means for identifying high-quality teachers. School principals are the primary school-based actors responsible for implementing teacher evaluation policies at the school level and must make sense of these policies at an ever-increasing pace. These sensemaking processes have great implications for how teacher evaluation policies play out in practice. In this paper I ask (a) what factors influence principals’ sensemaking of changing teacher evaluation policies and (b) how these factors influence both decision-making by principals, as well as the ways the policies are implemented. I …