good

1. Schooling has become one of the most substantial and pervasive human endeavours of
the current world. Schools comprise a large proportion of public and private undertakings and
are widely known as vital means of social and economic policy to uphold character
development, social progress and national wealth. In this regard, quality is at the top agenda
and improving quality is probably the most important task facing any education institution.
Despite its significance, research regards quality as a surreptitious concept. It is confusing to
define and often hard to assess. One’s idea of quality often differs with another, and
researchers have never come to the same end when discussing what constitutes a quality
schooling system. (Sallis, 2002)
As schooling involves a large number of employment for teachers and administrators,
public are interested in knowing how effective the provision of school education is and how it
can be measured. Many studies have been conducted on educational effectiveness in terms of
input, process and outcomes of schooling for students, teachers, parents and the wider
community. Most of them employ process-product approaches but Muijs (2006) argues that
the research design needs to be in accord with the researchers’ theories at all levels. This
opens an opportunity for a constructivist to dig an alternative methodology to research
teacher effectiveness. Moreover Kyriakides et. al.(2002, p. 316-317) admits even in a
process-product procedure of measuring teacher effectiveness, we need to know what
teachers are trying to accomplish in order to interpret their behaviours, and also to make
useful contextual and qualitative distinctions for coding those behaviours.
The fact that teachers have strong positive effects on students’ experiences of
schooling, including their attitudes, behaviours and achievement outcomes, is of vital
importance with profound implications (Rowe, 2002). Researchers and policy makers also
agree that teacher quality is a central policy issue in education reform. Unfortunately,
Kyriakides et. al.(2002) notes that the limited conception of teaching and disconnection from
professional development make it difficult to conceptualize problems of teacher effectiveness
in the research literature.
Anderson (1991) states that an effective teacher is one who quite consistently
achieves goals which either directly or indirectly focus on the learning of their students” (p.
18). Unfortunately direct information about teacher effectiveness is not available directly,
many teacher evaluation studies are based on information about teacher qualifications,
teacher characters or students’ performance. Although many experts can identify excellent
teachers, Medley and Shannon (1994) argue difficult to determine exactly which teacher
characteristics contribute to desired student outcomes.
Keneth J. Rowe. 2002. The Importance of teacher quality. Issue Analysis. No 22. 28 February
2002.
L. Kyriakides1, R.J. Campbell, and E. Christofidou. 2002. Generating Criteria for Measuring
Teacher Effectiveness Through a Self-Evaluation Approach: A Complementary Way of
Measuring Teacher Effectiveness. School effectiveness and school improvement. Vol 13 no
3.pp. 291-325
Sallis, Edward J. 2002. Total quality management in education 3ed ed. London: Kogan Page
Daniel Muijs (2006): Measuring teacher effectiveness: Some methodological reflections,
Educational Research and Evaluation: An International Journal on Theory and Practice, 12:1,
53-74