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Evaluation
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Trusting the Teacher: Evaluating Educational Innovation

Gerry McNamara

Dublin City University, Ireland, gerry.mcnamara{at}dcu.ie

Joe O’hara

Dublin City University, Ireland, joe.ohara{at}dcu.ie

The efficacy of and ethical justification for applying positivist research principles to the evaluation of social processes such as education are being increasingly challenged. Recent work in educational evaluation has tried to meet this challenge by moving the focus towards understanding the impact of projects and innovations on their recipients and by encouraging self-evaluation. However the dominant form of educational evaluation still involves judgements made through the eyes of the external evaluator and the connotation persists of evaluation as the external monitoring of professional practice. This article suggests that in the case of educational programmes, initiatives and innovations the focus of judgement should move from the evaluators to the practitioners and the former should find a new role in supporting the professional development of the latter.

Key Words: autonomy • instrumental evaluation • processual evaluation • professional development • self-evaluation

Evaluation, Vol. 10, No. 4, 463-474 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/1356389004050219
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