ABSTRACT
Much of the literature on ‘effective schools’ and ‘school improvement’, asserts that institutional and individual personal professional development needs should be synchronized or at least reconciled. Appraisal would appear, therefore, to offer an ideal mechanism through which both needs may be addressed. However, because appraisal takes place over a set period each year or two years it will be limited in its ability to effect change. Many (though not all) internal and external changes create challenges from which teachers may learn. Moreover, teachers’ ‘critical learning’ phases will not match with appraisal systems nor with each other’s. Indeed, if the research on teacher learning, development phases and working conditions discussed in earlier chapters is taken into account, the quest for synchronicity must be tempered by the realities of learning and development which are neither linear nor entirely rational or predictable. This chapter, therefore, focuses upon appraisal linked to career-long professional development planning and change as a means of development which is ‘interactive with’ rather than ‘reconciled to’ both individual and school needs.
