Teacher Evaluation Systems and Their Impact Upon Academic Dance Educators and Their Evaluators

The purpose of this study was to explore gaps and biases within public school teacher evaluation systems and their effects on traditional public school dance educators and their evaluators. At the heart of this is the attempt to answer a series of questions involving the voice of six dance educators and five instructional evaluators concerning their experiences with teaching evaluation systems and their direct correlation to educational dance in the areas of fairness, equitability and bias. The research instruments used in this study included electronic surveys and face-to-face interviews, both of which were created specifically for each participant population. The data suggested that public school educational dance teachers and their evaluators felt the best way to conduct observations and evaluations of dance educators was through the professional lens of qualified, educational dance professionals and that evaluators without professional background or experience in educational dance are ill-equipped to support educational dance teachers.