Teacher Evaluation Policies: Logics of Action and Complex Adaptation to School Contexts

AbstractRecent teaching evaluation policies originated a generalized conflict as teachers interpreted them in terms of a stronger control and school re-centralization. Open resistance and never seen teachers’ demonstrations rose all over the country. Based on conceptual tools - interdependency and adaptive complexity – from the complexity theory, this study focuses on the indeterminacy factors stemming from the evaluation implementation process and on schools adaptive strategies to facing the new situation. The interpretative analysis of a school case data identified logics of uncertainty and ambivalence as well as successful adaptive strategies to re-establish the school organizational equilibrium and pacification of the school climate. Yet, if professional autonomy was legitimated through school-based decisions, it also appeared to be contradicted by the way the school director's leadership tended to reproduce hierarchical and official mandates at local level