Teachers in academia are usually not required to have teacher training but must often be evaluated by their students who expect them to have much better teaching qualifications than their high school teachers. However, teachers in elementary and high schools are required to go through several years of teacher training, resulting in a teaching…

Higher Education is in a time of immense change. Colleges and Universities are under greater pressure to demonstrate their value while experiencing increasing levels of economic constraints, changing accountability structures, and pressure to demonstrate excellence in teaching and learning/student outcomes. Technology, elearning and massification…

This paper describes an introductory workshop, Preparing to be a Peer Reviewer, presented at the University of British Columbia (UBC) to give hands-on practice to faculty members and others in order to provide formative peer review upon request. This workshop, which was designed at the request of a faculty member, is complemented by an Advanced…

Considerations for establishing purposes of evaluation are described in view of controversies that focus on justification and use of ratings of instructors as well as attempts to meet demands and ward off pressures for accountability. General models are proposed to serve as guidelines for further development and specification of purposes.…

This paper focuses on Alberta, Canada's 1998 "Teacher Growth, Supervision and Evaluation" policy, examining its origins and adoption along with the significant shift in images of teaching and supervision that it conveys. Both the process and substance of the policy are analyzed within the context of Alberta's larger plan to restructure…

"My Learning Curve" is a visual rapid appraisal technique that was developed in Canada for exploratory use in one of a series of loosely coupled evaluation studies of a redesigned teacher education plan. It is designed to allow teacher candidates enrolled in the program to depict quickly and visually, rather than verbally, their…

Portfolio construction is a complex social practice with intentions, rules, and standards. This definition is not typically found in teacher education literature and has implications for evaluating students' portfolios. The paper examines teacher education students' recollections of creating portfolios in one Canadian program and argues that…

Summarizes trends in competency testing for teachers in the United States. Points out the strong public support for this testing and the problems with predicting teaching success from test results. Concludes that teacher competency testing in Canada, currently less prevalent than in the United States, will increase dramatically. (JHZ)

A brief description is given of an ongoing comprehensive model of program evaluation that has as its major goal the improvement of teacher education. The creation of the Committee for Evaluating Teacher Education Programs (CETEP) was the result of a collaboration among three Canadian universities that developed a conceptual framework for…

Contends that evaluating teaching is just as important as evaluating students. Argues that most teacher evaluation does not examine what students actually learn from the teacher. Recommends the use of written entry performance tests and subsequent written tests to evaluate teaching effectiveness. (CFR)

This study investigated the opinions of college faculty and administrators regarding the purpose, control, and process of performance evaluation, hypothesizing that job orientations and expectations would influence their opinions--that administrators would favor an economic model emphasizing authoritative and quantitative measures; teachers would…

Using a case study format, this paper examines and assesses the method of selecting applicants for admission to the bachelor of education program at Queen's University, Ontario, and relates this selection procedure to teacher performance following graduation. The class of 1971-72 serves as the focus of this study because of the extended and…

Surveys, focus-group interviews, observations, and journal writings of 11 Canadian student teachers revealed sources of stress during the teaching practicum: role clarification, expectations, conformity, time, evaluation, assignments, peer discussions, and inconsistent feedback. Student teachers identified communication, conformity, initiative,…

Designed to promote equitable and fair student teacher practicum supervision and evaluation, contextual supervision (CS) can be used by both college and school-based supervisors. This approach is supported by current reforms in teacher education, contemporary supervisory models, and validation in actual practice. (IAH)

The discrepancy approach, with a nonmonotonic function, was used in a questionnaire designed to measure the difference between reality as perceived and desires. Reality is described as a student's perception of teacher performance and notion of an ideal teacher performance. The questionnaire deals with both the intensity and direction of a…