Teachers’ Accounts of Changing Evaluation Practices at Public School Board Meetings

Investigating the construction of policy-related notions (e.g., teacher effectiveness) and their objects (e.g., teacher evaluation) through discursive perspectives and at local levels of implementation is valuable because the assumptions made during the initial policy formulation often lead to variability in interpretations and tensions in enactment when the policy reaches local contexts. Recent calls for “reclaiming the local in language education policy” (Canagarajah, 2015) and for discursive perspectives in education policy implementation (Lester, Lochmiller, & Gabriel, 2015) are suggestive of this need. While discourse studies of education policy frequently focus on written policy documents (e.g., Thomas, 2005), it is also important to focus on the ways stakeholders frame these policies in and through their talk in various settings.

This study used a discourse analytic approach known as discursive psychology (DP) (Potter, 2012). One area of focus in DP has been on constructions of accountability and versions of reality in the context of broader areas such as political disputes (Edwards and Potter, 1992; MacMillan and Edwards, 1999). We drew on this rich body of literature in grounding our study of teachers’ accounts of changing evaluation policies in one school district.

Data are derived from 60 five-minute speeches recorded during school board meetings and publicly available on the school board website. Modified Jeffersonian (2004) transcription was used to transcribe the data and to capture paralinguistic elements (e.g., pauses, intonation). Analysis identified patterns in how participants ‘worked up’ their reasons for speaking out at these meetings, as well as in how they accounted for their own practices in light of changing evaluation policies. We describe participants’ patterned use of three conversational features: membership categorization devices (MCDs), storytelling, and numbers as objective facts and describe how these were used to position both themselves and the educational policies discursively in interaction.