Performance in action: the teacher as guide

Performance as it relates to tasks in an organizational setting may be defined as effort exerted by workers in the organisation to achieve particular goals set by the organisation. Performance is something that the government of Jamaica wants to maximize. If you visit the website of the Cabinet Office, for example, you will see strategies outlined in documents such as Public Sector Transformation, Public Sector Modernisationas well as Performance Management and Evaluation programmes. The strategies outlined in these documents signal the government’s aim to raise the level of performance in the public sector.

 Among organisations targeted are schools and the government is urging them to improve their performance citing low returns on its investment in education as the reason for its concern with school improvement. And, with the government creating the National Education Inspectorate (NEI), it is indicative of its expectations of the education system. The NEI has a mandate to review the performance of schools and make recommendations, where necessary, for their improvement. This is a clear attempt at boosting the organisational performance of schools. According to Kim (2004), a scholar of Public Administration

“[t]he concept of organizational performance [as it relates to government agencies] refers to whether the agency does well in discharging the administrative and operational functions pursuant to the mission and  whether the agency actually produces the actions and outputs pursuant to the mission or the institutional mandate (pp. 250-251)

This definition points to a results orientation, effectiveness i.e. the aim of performance in the organisation. There are several levels of performance pointed to here. First, there is performance of the administrative/management team. In the context of the school, this would refer to performance of principal and her/his administrative staff including senior teachers. Second, there is performance of the faculty and other staff who are tasked with carrying out the teaching and other support functions, the “operational functions” according to Kim. But these ‘performances’ should be based on the mission of the organisation.

 Many schools now have mission statements that set out the intention of the schools with regard to their stakeholders. Sometimes the focus is solely on the students. At other times, the focus of the mission statement is on the students and the wider community. Kim’s definition of organisational performance, which is similar in many respects to other definitions of organisational performance, is saying that, for the goals of, in this case, schools to be realised, there must be demonstrable, measurable performance by management and staff. And, this performance should be geared towards creating some kind of improvement in students [and in the wider community].

 Schools, adopting mission statement, may be doing so because they feel compelled to do so by government directives, not necessarily because they are committed to the ideals that their mission statements encapsulate. I believe that if school management patterns their strategic plans (and I am assuming that they do have strategic plans) to reflect their mission statements, which are really the broad goal to be achieved by the schools, they will see tangible results in the performance of their schools. 

If teachers really feel invested in their students, they need not feel constrained by the curriculum or management practices lead the process of change, at least in their classrooms. They can contribute to the improvement of the performance of their students, and by extension the organisation. 

I will use one example that a colleague shared with me to illustrate how teachers can make a marked difference in the classroom and the school community. This teacher, I will refer to as Ms Brown. She worked at a low performing school as ranked by the NEI. Before entering the classroom, she was trained as a teacher of English. She subsequently completed a first degree in Management and a Masters degree in Human Resource Management (HRM). She requested and was assigned courses in business along with English, which was the primary subject she taught. Ms Brown realised that her students of English were not performing up to the required standard. As a result, she decided to employ Human Resource Management techniques in her classroom. This is what she had to say about her ‘experiment’.

From my experience, the application of HRM techniques does in fact effect improvements in the target group. During 2005-2010, I decided to use these techniques in my grade 7 form class. We, as form teachers, were expected to work with these students from grade 7 to grade 11 i.e. the students’ tenure at the school. I established communication channels, utilized conflict management techniques, created work teams, informal but private appraisal and evaluation and most importantly motivational sessions to build self esteem and to encourage the optimization of the students’ potential. The students were taught to respect God, persons in authority, their peers and themselves.  After evaluating aspects of the program I realized that I had to assist the students in setting personal targets instead of having a set of targets for the entire class.  At the end of year three, there was marked improvement in the students’ academic performance, attitude, discipline, deportment and punctuality to school. This change was noticeable across the school community and was commented on. I was awarded the distinction of being named Teacher of the Year in 2007. At the end of five years two students from the form achieved distinctions in all eight CSEC subjects, a feat that the school had never achieved in its recent history. In addition to being their form teacher, I was their teacher of English. My class achieved 86% passes, that is, students gaining grades 1, and 11, while only four students failed the examination out of a cohort of forty students.  They surpassed the school’s average and the national average in the subject.

From this informal Action Research I discovered that real change can be made in organizations if appropriate techniques are introduced to effect the desired changes.

It would seem, then, that if teachers are innovative and are willing to draw on all the resources that they possess, they can contribute to the performance of their organisation, in spite of management. What seems to be lacking in many schools deemed to be low performing or failing is committed, visionary leadership and staff who believe that change is possible. Committed, innovative performance by teachers can lead to committed performance from students which, in turn, can lead to improved performance in the organisation.  

People are one of the resources in the organisation and probably the most important. It is through the actions of people who work in the organisation that the organisation’s mission is accomplished. So, when we examine and measure the performance of schools we have to examine and measure the performance of the people who work in the school. And, in many cases, we also need to examine and measure the performance of the other stakeholders – the Ministry of Education, members of the community in which schools are sited and parents – to get a “true” understanding of the schools' performance. All of these stakeholders exert some effort that will lead to the positive or negative performance of the school.

Kim, S. (2005). Individual-level factors and organizational performance in government organizations. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 15, 245–61 retrieved from