TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of classroom observation in the development and assessment of schoolteachers in Vietnam
T2 - a review of national policy and research
AU - O’Leary, Matt
AU - Cui, Vanessa
AU - Kiem, Minh Tran
AU - Dang, Dung Tien
AU - Nguyen, Giang Thi Huong
AU - Thi Hoang, Kim Hue
N1 - Funding Information:
This paper emerged as an output from one of six collaborative research projects that were part of the research development and innovation strand of a wider teacher education project funded by the World Bank in Vietnam. The project involved a collaboration between a group of experienced teacher education researchers from Middle England University in the UK and a group of teacher educators and post-doctoral researchers from a range of universities across Vietnam. The project included two distinct phases: 1) a narrative review of current policy and cognate research literature and 2) qualitative data collection involving educators from a range of secondary schools across four provinces in Vietnam. This paper focuses exclusively on the first phase of the project.
Funding Information:
As part of a research project funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency, lesson study was first introduced on an in-service teacher training programme in the Bac Giang Province in Vietnam in 2006 (Saito et al., ). The project focused on developing classroom observation and teacher reflection skills through a series of professional teacher meetings. The researchers faced several challenges in promoting joint classroom observation and reflective practice during the project. One of the biggest challenges was getting teachers to move beyond their engagement with observation as an evaluative tool for judging their colleagues’ teaching and students’ work and instead to use it as a means of sharing their thinking about practice and developing empathy and compassion. Encouraging dialogic interaction among teachers in the project also proved challenging. These challenges are illustrative of a deeper epistemological and methodological divide between the principles underpinning a model like lesson study and the way in which observation is conceptualised in the Vietnamese education system, an issue explored further in the final section of this paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2023/3/27
Y1 - 2023/3/27
N2 - This paper focuses on the role of classroom observation in the development and assessment of schoolteachers in Vietnam through a narrative review of current policy and cognate research literature. The overall aim of this review was twofold. Firstly, to contribute to a growing bank of Vietnam-based studies to maximise the value of the insights from this scholarly work into recent policy reforms on teachers' professional development in Vietnam. Secondly, to widen access and exposure to published work on the topic in Vietnamese that is not readily accessible to English-speaking scholars. This review revealed a long history and engrained culture of using observation as a teacher performance evaluation tool. In recent years, there have been policy reforms and research studies that have repositioned observation as a tool for teacher learning and development. However, the implementation of these reforms has been inconsistent across Vietnam, along with recent reform having encountered resistance from a culture of compliance in schools. This paper identifies some of the key issues that policy makers and educational leaders need to address in practice in order to ensure the effective and meaningful implementation of the reforms relating to the use of observation for learning and developmental purposes.
AB - This paper focuses on the role of classroom observation in the development and assessment of schoolteachers in Vietnam through a narrative review of current policy and cognate research literature. The overall aim of this review was twofold. Firstly, to contribute to a growing bank of Vietnam-based studies to maximise the value of the insights from this scholarly work into recent policy reforms on teachers' professional development in Vietnam. Secondly, to widen access and exposure to published work on the topic in Vietnamese that is not readily accessible to English-speaking scholars. This review revealed a long history and engrained culture of using observation as a teacher performance evaluation tool. In recent years, there have been policy reforms and research studies that have repositioned observation as a tool for teacher learning and development. However, the implementation of these reforms has been inconsistent across Vietnam, along with recent reform having encountered resistance from a culture of compliance in schools. This paper identifies some of the key issues that policy makers and educational leaders need to address in practice in order to ensure the effective and meaningful implementation of the reforms relating to the use of observation for learning and developmental purposes.
KW - classroom observation
KW - professional development
KW - education policy
KW - Vietnam
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UR - https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/14297
U2 - 10.1080/1359866X.2023.2191307
DO - 10.1080/1359866X.2023.2191307
M3 - Article
SN - 1359-866X
SP - 395
EP - 407
JO - Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education
JF - Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education
ER -