The collaboration in school evaluation processes: suggestions for teachers’ professional development.

Abstract

In school improvement studies, collaborative processes within and between schools are considered powerful catalysts for educational change. In this perspective, the Valu.E for schools project represents a basis for experimenting collaborative training methodologies and decentralized development activities about school evaluation processes. The training activity involved 385 teachers of 42 schools situated in 9 Italian regions. The contribution illustrates the participants' point of view on the collaborative and comparison opportunities they had, triangulating the data emerging from the mid-term focus group and from the final satisfaction questionnaire. The textual corpus deriving from the two data sources was subjected to computer-assisted coding. The results highlight the importance of comparison and collaboration activities to strengthen the participants' reflective self-analysis and cognitive decentralization on self-evaluation practices; in particular, comparison activities allow them to revisit their school-level activities through new reading keys.