TEACHING EVALUATION TO IMPROVE STUDENT LEARNING

Teaching evaluation is perhaps the most difficult and least understood process. Teachers should be evaluated considering results in terms of some set of criteria. This idea involves many problems, which make it impossible to implement. Teaching action, in fact, is particularly complex to observe and judge. Its procedural nature prevents a cold assessment, distanced in time and space, and deals with dynamic events. In addition to, there is another more specific question: what is the teacher who does not recognize the need to evaluate their work as a counterpoint to the assessment of student learning? Everyone reminds the relation that connects specific learning outcomes with the action that the individual teacher and school have devised to pursue them. In the professional practices, on the other hand, the control of teaching and the quality of service provided by school are, at least in Italy, almost inexistent and the assessment is made up of sterile rituals (compilation of documents, marks, talks with parents) which only consider the student and the results obtained within his learning process. The objective of this article is to analyze some reasons and some difficulties emerging from the debate on teaching evaluation in Italy. Based on such information we will try to reconstruct some lines of research about the effectiveness of teaching and we will propose, in the last paragraph, some advices to set up a justifiable proposal for evaluating the educational action.