Let’s Get Real: Authentic Methods Of Assessing Principals’ Performance

When it comes to assessing performance in the professions, it is tempting to opt for a detailed checklist of skills. After all, this approach offers to simplify the potentially daunting task of evaluating professional competence by enumerating isolated skills that can be assessed one at a time in a straightforward and ostensibly objective manner (Masters & McCurry, 1990). Notwithstanding the attraction of using checklists as a basis for assessing professional performance, we report in this paper an alternative standards framework for school principals that provides a richer and more useful basis for making judgements about the quality of principals' work. In choosing this route we are taking a less trodden and perhaps more difficult path. However, we are convinced that many rewards are to be gleaned along the way. In this connection, we are reminded of Robert Frost's familiar verse:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I -

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

(Robert Frost, 'The Road Not Taken')