Classroom assessment and instructional leadership. Development and evaluation of a feedback intervention for school principals

本项目的目的是开发和评估提高教学质量的反馈干预措施。这一干预旨在为校长提供一种工作人员发展工具。校长将根据新开发的标准化课堂评估向教师提供反馈，该评估使用观察表。评估包括教学质量的三个基本维度(教学、动机、课堂管理)，这三个维度具有很大的可操作性，具有很大的歧视性。此外，每个维度都区分了四个层次的教学标准(标准制定)。这些水平既是校长向教师反馈意见的基础，也是校长和教师之间进一步制定目标以提高教学质量的基础。工作方案包括制定观察表，为学校校长制定评分员培训，以及包括目标设定过程的反馈程序。在一项初步研究中，开发并验证了观察表。在主要研究中，我们通过现场实验来衡量反馈干预对教学质量发展的影响。为此，实现了实验设计。干预措施包括参加培训的校长对教师的反馈，包括课堂评估、反馈和目标设定。在控制组中，教师在研究期间没有收到校长对教学质量的任何反馈。实验的目的是衡量与控制组相比，干预措施对提高教学质量(从学生的角度)的平均有效性。本研究的理论基础是反馈-干预研究和目标设置理论，但到目前为止还没有应用到学校领导研究中。因此，目前的教育研究缺乏关于学校领导反馈对提高教学质量的有效性的研究结果。因此，学校领导力研究将从概念和经验上受益于这项研究。特别是，可操作性差的教学领导概念将在更强大的理论基础上得到巩固。另一个好处是验证了基于教学标准功能分析的观察表，该观察表也可用于其他开发和研究目的。具有实用价值的是制定和评估反馈干预措施，作为德国大多数州强制性教师评估的一部分，校长可以使用这种干预措施。

The aim of this project is to develop and evaluate a feedback intervention that improves teaching quality. This intervention is designed to provide a staff development instrument to principals. Principals would base their feedback to teachers on a newly developed standardized classroom assessment, which utilizes an observation sheet. The assessment comprises three basic dimensions of teaching quality (instruction, motivation, classroom management), which are operationalized with a great degree of discrimination. Additionally, each dimension differentiates between four levels of teaching standards (standard setting). These levels form the basis for both feedback from principals to teachers as well as further goal setting between principals and teachers to improve teaching quality. The work program encompasses the development of the observation sheet, the development of rater trainings for school principals and a feedback procedure that includes goal setting processes. In a pilot study, the observation sheet is developed and validated. In the main study, a field experiment is conducted to measure the effect of a feedback intervention on the development of teaching quality. For this purpose, an experimental design is realized. The intervention consists of feedback to teachers by principals who took part in the training on classroom assessment, feedback and goal setting. In the control group, teachers do not receive any feedback from their principals on teaching quality during the study period. The aim of the experiment is to measure the average effectiveness of the intervention to increase teaching quality (from the students perspective) compared to a control group. Theoretical foundations of the study are feedback-intervention research and goal-setting theory, which have not been applied to school leadership research so far. Therefore, current education research lacks findings on the effectiveness of feedback from school leaders to improve teaching quality. For that reason, school leadership research would benefit conceptually and empirically from this study. Particularly, the poorly operationalized concept of instructional leadership would consolidate on a stronger theoretical basis. Another benefit is the validation of an observation sheet that is based on a functional analysis of teaching standards, which can also be used for other development and research purposes. Of practical value is the development and evaluation of a feedback intervention that could be used by school principals as part of the mandatory teacher appraisal in most German states.