ABSTRACT
Focussing on the Republic of Ireland, this chapter begins by providing some information about the context and noting current external and internal evaluation practices. The scene preceding the current state of play is explained, when a claim was made about the decline in quality of education provision in Ireland. The policy response to this claim was, in part, a series of decisions made centrally to expand external evaluation practices and to make internal evaluation obligatory. While analysis elsewhere has charted Ireland’s school evaluation reform historically (Coolahan and O’Donovan, 2009) or connected it to global patterns in education reform movements at the system level (Brown et al., 2016a), less attention has been paid to analysing how individual teachers make sense of the reform and, specifically, linking their sense-making processes to theories of professional agency. In this chapter vignettes constructed from interview data generated with three teachers are presented, offering rich accounts of teachers’ sense-making of external and internal evaluation. Interview data manifested as tangled tales in the process of generating the vignettes, whereby the teachers demonstrated professional agency in both resistance and compliance with new policies of evaluation in their practice. In the discussion that follows, themes recurring in the vignettes are raised, providing an insight into dilemmas of policy and practice in local contexts. Based on their sense-making, where teachers declare themselves or appear as either active subjects or passive objects through local school evaluation practices, implications for contemporary practices of evaluation are highlighted.
