The meaning of the evaluative look in teacher performance evaluatio

This dissertation is a hermeneutic phenomenological exploration of the teacher's experience of being evaluated. Specifically, it investigates the meaning of the evaluative look in formal teacher performance evaluation.;Written in first person narrative, the question is opened in Chapter One by addressing The Scholarly Context of Inquiry into Teacher Evaluation. Through positivist and interpretivist frames, evaluation practices are historicallly examined as reflections of epistemological perspectives. Criticisms and issues arising from metaphorical looking at teaching are addressed.;Chapter Two, Clarification of Methodological Principles Guiding the Question, introduces the concepts integral to understanding hermeneutic phenomenological methodology. Anecdotal remembrance is explored as a unique way of hermeneutics.;The Journey Begins with a Prologue to Chapter Three, which captures a childhood adventure in straying beyond a mother's watchful eye. This introduces Chapter Four, The Experience of being evaluated.;Chapter Five, entitled Interrogating the Silence, is presented in two parts: "The Masks of Evaluation", and "Casting Off the Masks" of evaluation as improvement of instruction and teacher professional growth. The evaluative look is revealed as objectifying and devaluing teachers, forcing inauthentic being and removal of possibility of existential growth. Teaching is reduced to a relation ingenuine encounter. A constrained notion of pedagogy and pedagogue are sustained through an historical privileging of vision. Evaluation, as mendacious experience, is ultimately little more that the handmaiden of accountability.;Chapter Six, Appropriation, calls for the need to reconceptualize teaching, to look beyond the metaphors of labor/craft, art, professional judgement and moral craft, to re-envision teaching as pedogogic relationship.;In Creating the Space for Possibility, Chapter Seven informs administrative practice by calling for pedagogic looking at teachers. It suggests the development of a language of being and becoming to describe how teachers are with students. Through reframing administrative structure, evaluation may be revisioned and reconceived to help teachers become self-evaluative.;An Epilogue: Completing the Circle closes with the study with "A Journey to the Possible", in taking one final adventure with the child of the hermeneutic circle in "Exploring the Enhancing Look".;An extensive Bibliography on teacher evaluation, administrative practice, narrative discourse, hemeneutics and phenomenology precede the Appendix, which contains samples of conventional teacher evaluation instruments, checklists, and forms, used in Alberta school districts.