Written by Mary-Clare Startin, Vice Principal, Head of Senior School, St George's British International School Rome, Italy.

The annual teacher review or appraisal process in many schools can feel like an administrative and transactional process —a once-a-year scramble to create a list of disconnected tasks to tick off, rather than an opportunity to celebrate our skills and identify areas for growth. At St George’s, we wanted to find a way to ensure the professional review was more than a compliance exercise and could become the engine for professional growth and the catalyst for a true learning culture. 

We set out to move the conversation away from what teachers were doing to who they were becoming as educators. Our goal was not just to monitor performance, but to foster a collective, common language around professional practice and aspiration. 

Our journey began three years ago by creating an aspirational foundation for self-reflection. We dedicated a leadership day in September 2022 to a collaborative mission: defining the core attributes of a "St George's Teacher”.  The process drew on the UK Teacher Standards, previous guidelines shared on high quality teaching, our School Values and our reflections on the unique qualities of our international community.   

This crucial first step, involving both senior and middle leaders, ensured that our new framework was rooted in a peer-defined and consensual understanding of what it meant not just to be a successful practitioner, but a successful practitioner in the St George’s context.  This gave every colleague a clear framework against which to measure their own beliefs and practice. This alignment is explored by Marsden and Belfield (2005) who recognise that the setting of “micro level” targets to develop employees individually needs to be informed by the wider goals of the organisation if they are to contribute to significant, collective development; we were keen for our teachers’ individual work to feel part of a whole-school effort.

After using this set of attributes as a focus for self-reflection and lesson visit feedback for two years, the time was right to take the next step and bring this framework to life, using a common professional vocabulary. For each of the core attributes, we worked together as a leadership team to create a detailed articulation of the behaviours that would demonstrate a colleague as: 

• Working on it: Developing their skills and intentional practice in this area. 

• Doing It: Consistently demonstrating high-quality practice. 

• Modelling It: The apex of practice, using expertise to support colleagues’ development. 

This three-point scale firmly shifted the tone of the self-review process from judgement to development and it provided a tool for deep self-assessment, allowing teachers to identify areas they wanted or needed to develop, and, crucially, areas where they could lead and model for others. 

The ultimate aim of the 'Modelling It' category was a subtle, yet profound, cultural shift: to encourage a professional learning community where reaching the highest level meant actively sharing expertise to elevate the entire school, not just achieving personal excellence in isolation. 

Furthermore, explicitly describing what each attribute looked like in practice led to a greater sense of alignment and purpose in terms of all colleagues knowing the behaviours and attitudes to which we are all aspiring and the framework gave a common language with which to discuss and review this. 

To ensure this framework led to meaningful action, we restructured our professional development partnerships. We recognised that professional growth often happens best outside of traditional line management structures. 

We moved away from partnerships based solely on reporting lines and towards bespoke pairings that leveraged a wider range of colleagues' skills. This was a deliberate effort to make the process feel less about monitoring and more about collaboration and mutual learning. “Collaboration with other teachers was reported as the most influential type of professional learning on teachers' self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and sources of efficacy.” (Durksen, Klassen, & Daniels, 2017) and so this was an area we wanted to leverage. 

To support these new pairings, we also developed learning conversation prompt sheets based on a coaching model. These sheets were tailored to whether the colleague was 'working on', 'doing', or 'modelling' a particular attribute, ensuring the resulting conversation was specific, supportive, and action oriented. 

While this is only our first year with the new model, the initial feedback is really encouraging.  We've seen high levels of engagement, and a particular boost in confidence among colleagues who were asked to serve as development partners for the first time. These are teachers who, while not in management roles, possess deep expertise—and now have a formal, valued structure through which to share it. 

Firestone and Pennell (1993) posited that “…the meaningfulness a teacher recognises in their work is affected by the degree of consensus on educational goals and definitions of good teaching within a school … allowing them to set their own practice and beliefs into a wider framework which confirms their approach.”  and, in line with this finding, we hope we’ve turned our annual review into a vibrant, continuous process that fosters motivation and a true learning culture for every member of our staff.

References: 

Durksen, T.L., Klassen, R & Daniels, L.M (2017) Motivation and collaboration: The keys to a developmental framework for teachers’ professional learning, Teaching and Teacher Education vol. 67 

Firestone, W & Pennell, J (1993) ‘Teacher Commitment, Working Conditions, and Differential Incentive Policies’, Review of Educational Research vol. 63 (p.489-525) 

Marsden, D & Belfield, R (2005) ‘In brief: performance pay for teachers: is it working?’,  CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance 183, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE. 

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