MOE proposal says IWP should be done by MoE and ranking of teachers should be done by school authorities

The Ministry of Education (MoE) has come up with proposals and recommendations regarding Individual Work Plan (IWP), a performance evaluation system for teachers, after the Prime Minister ordered to review IWP for the education sector following grievances against IWP.

A task force was formed under the ministry to study the issue, and it talked with 887 teachers, 161 school staff, 74 principals and 3 counselors covering 11 dzongkhags and 3 thromdes across the country.

The task force observed possible risks such as, diversion of teachers’ attention from the actual teaching and assessment to other activities, increased documentation burden on the teachers like, gathering evidences for the work done and the IWP ranking system.

Lyonpo Norbu Wangchuk said, “In order to fix such issues, the ministry has come up with certain recommendations. The ministry would like to recommend Royal Civil Service Commission (RCSC) to give us the responsibility and accountability to manage the IWP for teachers and other staff in the schools. If that is given to us, considering the general guideline of RCSC and the aim and purpose of the IWP, the ministry will honour that and manage the IWP efficiently.”

Lyonpo said, “There are 6 domains or output areas such as, Leadership and Management Practices, Green School Domain, Curriculum Practices (planning and delivery), Holistic Assessment, Broader Learning Domain and School Community Vitality. Out of 6 domains, only core domain which includes curriculum practices and holistic assessment are directly related to the core mandate of teachers. The other four domains are classified as allied domains which are also important.”

He said, “For the core mandates, curriculum practices and holistic assessment shall be provided a weightage of 25 per cent each and the other four mandates shall be provided a weightage of 5 per cent each. If all the 6 domains are provided the same weightage, there are chances that individual diverting their attention all the domains. The teacher’s main focus should be on core domain”.

As for the increased documentation burden, the ministry has recommended the use of existing documents such as, student’s scores, yearly lesson plan, yearly block plan and daily lesson plan. As for the core mandates, the ministry feels about 80 per cent of the evidences should be documented and for the allied mandates, only 5 per cent of the evidences should be documented.

“There are four ranking categories such as, Outstanding, Very Good, Good and Need Improvement. Many teachers expressed that there is no correlation between the ranking done at the school and the ranking done at Teacher Resource Center (TRC) level. The principal and school committee would know the performance and behavior of teacher but when it reaches TRC level, there is mismatch of information and lots of issues,” the MoE Minister said.

Lyonpo added that the ministry recommends that the ranking should be done in schools, and not in TRC, to honour and respect the ranking submitted by schools. “The school’s principal and school committee will decide whom and how many to put in the outstanding category and this shall be determined by the Performance Management System (PMS) ranking of the school,” Lyonpo said.

He said a quota is not necessary for the very good and good category and that the teachers shall be categorized depending upon their capabilities. “In the ‘need improvement category’, the ministry has proposed two categories, if the teacher does not fulfill 50 per cent of his IWP targets and if the teacher has some character flaws like, habitual drinker and gambler and violates the law and the code of conduct of a teacher,” Lyonpo added.

According to the Education Minister, there are two aspects of the proposal and recommendation, one which the ministry can implement on their own like, changes in the weightage of 6 domains and weightage on documentation of evidences, and the other, where the ministry needs RCSC’s approval on how to do the ranking.

“The ministry and RCSC cannot rank the teachers’ performance, but it should be done by the school authority,” Lyonpo Norbu Wangchuk said.

A senior RCSC official said that they can only respond once they officially get the MoE proposal and then deliberate on it.