Trusting Schools and Teachers

The Authors: Gerry McNamara is Head of the School of Education Studies, Dublin City University. His areas of research interest include evaluation, curriculum development, and leadership. A member of the steering committee of the Irish Evaluation Network, he has numerous publications in related areas and has acted as principal investigator on a wide range of evaluation research projects.Joe O’Hara is Senior Lecturer at the School of Education Studies, Dublin City University, with responsibility for Initial Teacher Education. His recent research has focused on self-evaluation and the potential for information and communications technology to facilitate reflective professional engagement in teachers. He is a member of the steering committee of the Irish Evaluation Network, and has published widely in the field and has acted as a programme evaluator on a number of national and transnational projects.

«This is an extremely important and groundbreaking work of scholarship. The authors adopt a low-key, dispassionate tone, recognizing the validity of different positions on what they refer to as a spectrum of approaches to school evaluation. Yet the values of the work are clearly located in a concept of enhanced teacher professionalism. Perhaps most important, the book provides a blueprint for development that can facilitate both professional autonomy and public accountability. This book is an important contribution to the international literature on evaluation. It uses the Irish context not just as a case study but as an exemplar of how a serious engagement with educational politics can provide professionally satisfying outcomes. In doing so, it elevates educational evaluation from the realm of fraught political tensions to a site of teacher empowerment and professional fulfillment.» (Gary Granville, Head of Faculty of Education, National College of Art and Design, Dublin)«‘Trusting Schools and Teachers’ offers informative insights into the complexities of developing and implementing meaningful school evaluation in the European Union but more specifically in Ireland. For an experienced U.S. evaluator and aspiring evaluation scholar, this book echoes similarly noted challenges to establish school-based evaluation communities led by school principals and teachers. Gerry McNamara and Joe O’Hara do not attempt to disguise the blemishes that were evident in the critically important educational evaluation efforts undertaken in Ireland via its Whole School Evaluation and Looking at Our Schools initiatives. Rather, they present these blemishes as opportunities for increasing their understanding of this new phenomenon of school-based evaluation in Ireland for the purpose of refining their future efforts.» (Stafford Hood, Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Psychology of Education, Mary Lou Fulton College of Education, Arizona State University)