Workshop 1: Feedback and Self-Evaluation

SELF-EVALUATION IS A DIALOGUE

GRAZ conference 22 – 26 September 2004

WORKSHOP 5.1: Saturday morning

René Vanotterdijk: coordinating inspector Sec. Ed. Kristien Arnouts: inspector-general Sec. Ed. Inspectorate of the Flemish Community BELGIUM

Self-assessment and external auditing

One of the aims of the Flemish inspectorate is to stimulate the self-assessment of schools. During the preparation phase of the school audit, schools are asked to fill in some documents with quantitative and qualitative items about input, context, process and output. Within the qualitative part schools are asked to reflect on their educational processes (strong, weak points, evolution throughout recent years, expectations and plans for the near future, …). The inspectorate is fully aware of the risk or danger within this approach. This way of doing could lead to a steering of the process of self-assessment rather than a stimulating of it. In that case self-assessment and reflection as part of the innovative school project will be narrowed to carrying out external orders, meeting criteria of external evaluation.

Or can this approach be seen as an element of process-evaluation because the inspectorate is one of the actors? Yet, does this mean a break with school autonomy? More of these questions will be the subject of this fundamental tension between internal and external evaluation.

The discussion starts from actual cases out of the school experience of auditing.

More particularly we want to explore 2 different concepts regarding external school auditing and we want to investigate to what degree the concepts have a stimulating or a steering effect on the self development of schools. We want to critically set out the effects of school auditing in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium against the effects of school auditing in other countries (Austria in this case).

During this workshop we want to make use of a working method, the ‘carrousel’ or the ‘merry-go-round’ method, which is being used within the Flemish Inspectorate and which makes maximum use of dialogue in order to carry out internal self assessment.