Dr. W.A. Kritsonis - International Refereed Publication(s)

1. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCHOLARLY ACADEMIC INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY
VOLUME 10, NUMBER 1, 2008
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Conceptualization and Perceptions of Teaching as an
Artistic Form: National and International
Implications for Evaluation and Assessment
Dr. Monday T. Joshua
Faculty of Education
University of Calabar, Calabar – Nigeria
Akon M. Joshua (Mrs.)
Faculty of Education
Cross River University of Technology,
Akamkpa Campus, C.R.S., Nigeria
Florence Banku Obi
Institute of Education
University of Calabar, Calabar - Nigeria
Imo E. Umoinyang
Institute of Education
University of Calabar, Calabar – Nigeria
Eno P. Ntukidem (Mrs)
Institute of Education
University of Calabar, Calabar – Nigeria
William Allan Kritsonis, PhD
Professor and Faculty Mentor
PhD Program in Educational Leadership
The Whitlowe R. Green College of Education
Prairie View A&M University
Member of the Texas A&M University System
Visiting Lecturer (2005)
Oxford Round Table
University of Oxford, Oxford, England
Distinguished Alumnus (2004)
College of Education and Professional Studies
Central Washington University
Tyrone Tanner, EdD
Associate Professor
PhD Program in Educational Leadership
Prairie View A&M University
Donald F. DeMoulin
Argosy University - Atlanta
_____________________________________________________________________
ABSTRACT
Various definitions of teaching and the different conceptions of teaching (as a
labour, a craft, and an art, the production of a product, a client service, an
enterprise and as a profession) have been highlighted in this paper. The
conceptualization of teaching as an art, and therefore, the teacher as an artist,
has been analyzed in this paper, leading to the position that teaching techniques
and their application are not standardized for all situation and cases; but the
teacher’s personal goal skill and perceptions interplay to produce effective
teaching. The implications of evaluating teaching as an art have been discussed;
and self-evaluation has been projected as the major tool of artists (teachers) to

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achieve improvement in their trade. It is concluded that with self-evaluation as
a tool, teachers can groom themselves professionally and maximize learning in
their students. It is recommended that within the context of organizational goals,
every teacher should set his/her own personal goals/ objectives for specified
periods of time and periodically evaluate himself/herself based on those
goals/objectives.
_____________________________________________________________________
Introduction
Teaching is a very important concept not only in the classroom, but also in the
entire educational system and beyond. Teaching is an activity or a process that goes
on everyday, every time and everywhere. People do teach one thing or the other to
other people most of time of their conscious living. Parents/guardians, for example,
do teach their children/wards, spouses teach each other, friends teach themselves,
church/religious leaders do teach their members/followers, village heads teach their
subjects, and many other examples. Thus, teaching is very central to everyday living,
and it plays a significant role in the education or bringing-up or socialization of the
young and old in the society.
In school, teaching is one of the two main activities that go on in the
classroom. The other is learning. The teachers are employed and positioned to
“teach”, while the students/pupils are admitted and positioned to “learn”. The
underlying assumption is that teachers are to bring about learning in his/her pupils; or
simply put, ‘teaching results in learning’. The effectiveness of teaching, based on this
assumption, is judged by the quantity and/or quality of expected learning that has
taken place in the learners. However, it is generally accepted that very many factors
(variables) interplay in the classroom or in any teaching-learning situation within and
around the learner, which are completely outside the teacher’s control or
manipulation. And so, to base the success or effectiveness of a teaching activity on the
quantity or quality of learning it produces may be anything but fairness to the teacher.
So, teaching still begs for another or more acceptable definition.
There are many definitions in the literature, each depending on the
philosophical or theoretical orientation of the author. The traditional view of teaching
as a process of making impression on passive pupils, filling their empty minds and
brains with what they should know, has gradually given way to relatively never view
of teaching. This view still recognizes two parties in the teaching activity, namely the
teacher and the learner, but also specifies that each of these two has distinct roles to
play. In this direction, Bidwell (1973) defines teaching as a series of interactions
between someone in the role of a teacher and someone in the role of a learner, with
the explicit goal of changing one or more of the learner’s cognitive states (what he
knows or believes; or his skill in performing cognitive tasks or effective states, his
attitudes, values or motives). This definition implies that teaching is more of an
interaction between people performing specific roles – the teacher and the learner(s).
According to Onwuka (1990), a more modern view of teaching is that it is an
attempt to help someone to acquire or change an attitude, knowledge, idea, skill or
appreciation. It is the provision for experiences and guidance of activities designed to

3. MONDAY T. JOSHUA, AKON M. JOSHUA, FlLORENCE BANKU OBI, IMO E. UMOINYANG,
ENO P. NTUKIDEM, WILLIAM ALLAN KRITSONIS, TYRONE TANNER,
DONALD F. DEMOULIN
____________________________________________________________________3
promote learning on the part of those engaging in the activities. It is a complex
process of co-operation and intercommunication between teacher and learners, not a
one-way traffic in information from teacher to learner. All these expressions on, or
definitions of teaching generally imply that teaching in the classroom is more or less
an interaction between two key role-players, the teacher and the learner(s). The
learner can be seen and analyzed as the individual that is to benefit from the teaching
activity/exercise; or as a group of knowledge seekers seated in class with one major
aim in mind, which is to learn. Essentially, teaching consists of setting the stage so
that someone can learn. The teacher and the learners are both involved in setting the
stage for learning to occur. This implies that the teacher too continues to learn. Thus,
teaching involves creating or providing opportunities and experiences that will enable
the major role players to acquire the knowledge, skill, attitude and appreciation that
will serve as tools leading to change of behaviour (which is learning).
Conceptualization of Teaching as an Art
Teaching has been conceptualized in different ways. Each conceptualization
has implications for teaching, learning and evaluation of teaching. From the
integrative reviews of literature by Darling-Hammond, Wise and Pease (1983), Stark
and Lowther (1984) and Joshua (2001), six major conceptualization of teaching work
have been identified. These conceptualizations are:
i) Teaching as a Labour and teacher as a Labourer whose role is to implement
instructional program exactly as it has been prescribed by superiors
(administrators)
ii) Teaching as a Craft and teacher as a Craftsman or Technician whose role is to
manipulate the materials and tools around him/her to produce results
(learning) with little input from learners.
iii) Teaching as an Art, and teacher as an Artist whose role is to keep on trying to
develop more flexible, creative and adaptive ways of making people learn.
iv) Teaching as the production of a product, and teacher as a Producer (and
learners are the finished products) whose role is to ensure that the
finished/expected products are in the right quantities, qualities and at right
time with minimum excuses.
v) Teaching as a client-service and teacher as a specialized Service Provider
whose role is to satisfy his/her ‘client’s (who are learners and parents/society)
in providing services that are safe, beneficial and acceptable while being paid
for these services in a rather contractual manner.
vi) Teaching as a profession, and teacher as a Professional who has been prepared
to solve peculiar problems as they come, and whose role is to exercise sound
professional judgement as to when, where and on whom to apply one
technique/strategy or the other to solve problems and maximize learning in the
teaching-learning situation.

4. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCHOLARLY ACADEMIC INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY
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In addition, to these six, Akinpelu (1981) adds that teaching can also be
conceptualized as an enterprise. Of particular interest in this paper is the
conceptualization of teaching as an art, and the teacher as an artist. An art is the
making of painting, drawing, and sculpture which are beautiful or which express the
creative ideas of the producer (in this case, the artist). Art also refers to the creation or
performance of drama, music, poetry or painting. Thus, in arts, the key concept is
creativeness of the principal actor (the artist), with the skills that are required for such
creativeness. The artist is always himself/herself. He/she is constantly imagining and
devising creative ways of producing a product that first of all meets his/her own
desire/expectation, and then that is beautiful and attractive to another person, certainly
the interested party. He/she is constantly working on his/her arts, and is constantly
seeking improvement to meet his/her changing values, impressions and orientations,
and the changing times and environment.
Because, the artist is out to first of all impress himself/herself (that is, he
works to realize his/her own dreams/imaginations/goals), he/she is the first critic of
his/her work of art. Whenever he/she completes a work/product, he/she will first
scrutinize it (or evaluate it) to see how it has conformed to what he/she had desired to
achieve. While others may be applauding him/her for a work well done, he/she may
be reminiscing about his/her dream/imagination/goal that might not have fully
actualized. In addition to being a major critic of his/her work, the artist readily
welcomes the critique of fellow artists and other significant others, receives them as
input and utilizes them to further improve his/her work of arts.
In conceptualizing teaching as an “art”, the implication/assumption is that
teaching techniques and their application are not standardized for all situations and
cases, but may be novel, unconventional or unpredictable. This is not to say that
technique or standards of practice are ignored; but that their forms and uses are
personalized and situation oriented. Under this context of teaching as an art, teaching
is seen as a more personalized and creative activity, and the teacher is seen as an
“artist” who keeps on trying to develop multiple perspectives about teaching and
learning to become more flexible, creative and adaptive. A teaching art would involve
choice of presentation and evaluation procedures and implementation of these
procedures would depend not only on policymakers’ (educational
administrators’/practitioners’/researchers’) implicit theories on the “right ways of
doing them”, but also on the realities of the organizational context (Darling-
Hammond, Wise & Pease, 1983; Gage, 1978; Joshua, & Joshua (2001).
Implications for Evaluation of Teaching – The Case for Self-Evaluation
Evaluation as a concept or term has been variously defined. Generally,
evaluation is a process or activity directed at ascertaining whether or not some set
goals/objectives have been realized. It is a continuous and constant activity that most
human beings engage in whether knowingly or unknowingly, and whether
systematically or haphazardly. Bloom and others, quoted in Ndubisi (1990), view
evaluation as the systematic collection of evidence to determine whether in fact
certain changes are taking place in the learners, as well as to determine the amount or
degree of change in individual students. Gronlund (1985) gives his own definition of

5. MONDAY T. JOSHUA, AKON M. JOSHUA, FlLORENCE BANKU OBI, IMO E. UMOINYANG,
ENO P. NTUKIDEM, WILLIAM ALLAN KRITSONIS, TYRONE TANNER,
DONALD F. DEMOULIN
____________________________________________________________________5
evaluation from an instructional standpoint (which is the major focus in this paper) as
a systematic process of determining the extent to which instructional objectives are
achieved by pupils. These definitions and many others not cited here point to the fact
that evaluation in education should be seen as a continuous process that usually looks
for diagnosis of strengths and weaknesses in any educational activity or product.
There arises the need to view evaluation in a broad sense. Such broad-sense approach
to evaluation was illustrated by Bloom and others, and Ndubisi (1990) presents the
illustration as follows. The broad-sense approach views:
i) Evaluation as a method of acquiring and processing the evidence needed to
improve the students’ learning and teaching;
ii) Evaluation as including a great variety of evidence beyond the usual final
paper-and-pencil examination;
iii) Evaluation as an aid to clarifying the significant goals and objectives of
education, and as a process for determining the extent to which students are
developing in these desired ways;
iv) Evaluation as a system of quality control in which it may be determined at
each step in the teaching-learning process, whether the process is effective or
not, what changes must be made to ensure its effectiveness before it is too late;
v) Evaluation as a tool in educational practice for ascertaining whether
alternative procedures are equally effective or not in achieving a set of
educational ends.
All these views on evaluation point to the fact that evaluation of teaching
involves gathering data to ascertain whether the instructional objectives for the
particular teaching exercise have been achieved or not. And since it was earlier stated
that the teaching exercise (in schools) involves two persons, teacher and learners(s),
each playing his/her role, and since instructional objectives are usually expected to be
stated as behaviours of the learners, evaluation of teaching implies the judgement as
to whether the teachers’ expected outcomes in the learners have been realized or not.
In the conceptualization of teaching as an art; the teacher was identified as an
artist, and it was noted that artists are their own best critics. The evaluation approach
that is most suited for, and that is usually identified with, teaching as an art (and
teacher as an artist) is teachers’ self-assessment or self-evaluation. Other possible or
available approaches of teacher evaluation are principal/administrator evaluation of
the teacher, peer evaluation of the teacher, student evaluation of the teacher, use of
student test scores as basis for teacher evaluation, classroom observation and teacher
interviews (Darling-Hammond, Wise & Pease, (1983; Joshua, 1998, 1999). The tools
and processes used to assess teachers (whether their competence, job performance or
effectiveness) are based on assumptions about how these qualities are linked to one
another, how they may be measured, and how the measurements may be used to make
decisions. How a teacher (being an artist) may use self-evaluation to improve his
professional role is further examined.

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Self-Evaluation
This is an evaluation approach in which the teacher makes a critical personal
(or self) assessment of his/her strengths and weaknesses against both personal
standard/expectations, and organizational (school) standards/requirements. According
to Darling-Hammond, Wise and Pease (1983), self-evaluation has recently joined
other sources (approaches) of assessment as a technique in teacher evaluation. It is
less formal than other approaches, and is obviously not suitable for accountability or
summative decisions. It may not be regarded as a formal/proper evaluation
approach/process in itself, but as an important source of information and motivation
in a broader evaluation programme. The combination of self-evaluation and
individual goal-setting may promote self-reflection and motivation toward change and
growth. A teacher may/can use information, quantitative or qualitative or both,
derived from any evaluation techniques (e.g. HOD’s rating, student or peer rating,
analysis of students’ achievement scores, etc) to make judgments about this or her
own teaching, as to whether he/she is succeeding or not. Redfern (1980) and Lewis
(1982) consider self-evaluation as an essential component of what they call
cooperative evaluation models.
Self-evaluation of the teacher implies that the teacher is his/her own critic, and
makes an in-house assessment and clean-up, if necessary. Before other significant
others call his/her attention to certain flaws, the teacher on self-evaluation has already
discovered/identified some of them, if not all. Self-evaluation requires close
monitoring of one’s actions and inactions to identify the effects they are producing on
the teacher’s clientele, and how desirable or otherwise these effects are. In self-
evaluation, the teacher seeks to verify whether his/her goals and objectives for the
teaching exercise in a given period of time have been realistic and/or realized. The
teacher seeks to convince or reassure him/herself whether he/she is making positive
and expected impact in the learners to enable them progress in the expected direction
In self-evaluation, the teacher is holding him/herself accountable for some
salient aspects, if not all the outcomes of teaching-learning process. In spite of the
organizational (school) or outside goals and the prevailing teaching-learning
environment, the teacher who believes in self-evaluation is very willing, not
necessarily under pressure or fear of sanction, to accept some blames for some of the
things that may go wrong during the teaching-learning process. He/she sees
him/herself as having an interaction with a group of learners for whose
purposes/needs he/she was employed in the first instance. If the interaction does not
produce tangible and worthwhile results, he/she first of all is interested in and actually
finds out the outcome of the interaction, and, as an artist, quickly identifies what
he/she did not do well, and goes back to rework such aspect(s) of his/her professional
skills. A believer in and doer of self-evaluation does not pass the buck, the complete
back, when certain things do not go well in the teaching-learning situation, unless
he/she is thoroughly convinced that he/she has no part in the entire buck. Rather,
he/she investigates and collects information to discover what he/she did not do well,
and what improvement(s) he/she could make. Such believer is constantly gathering
information to enable him/her improve his/her professional career on a steady basis.
A teacher’s use of self-evaluation approach does not mean that he/she
excludes or undermines other approaches of teacher evaluation like the ratings of the
HOD/Administrator, students, peers and other significant others. As an artist, the

7. MONDAY T. JOSHUA, AKON M. JOSHUA, FlLORENCE BANKU OBI, IMO E. UMOINYANG,
ENO P. NTUKIDEM, WILLIAM ALLAN KRITSONIS, TYRONE TANNER,
DONALD F. DEMOULIN
____________________________________________________________________7
teacher still believes in, and uses, feedback from others in the instructional arena as
inputs in the onerous task of giving the best to his/her clients, and seeking to be the
best that he/she can possibly be. In making the critical self-assessment and the
subsequent judgement on self, the teacher relies on information from his/her students,
colleagues, head of department/supervisor, analysis of student scores and other
“mirrors” in the instructional arena. Thus, self-evaluation, as an approach of teacher
evaluation, works best when it is used in combination with other approaches to serve
the purpose of formative evaluation, which includes fostering the professional growth
of the teacher.
Most teacher evaluation processes are aimed at changing the ‘bad’ practice of
teachers, and reinforcing the ‘good’ practices. It is necessary therefore, to come to
grips with the subjectively reasonable beliefs of teachers, and to give full weight to
teachers’ beliefs and intentions in assessing what they do and in guiding them in the
formation of alternative beliefs about useful courses of action. It should be accepted
that teachers are rational professionals who make judgements and carry out decisions
in uncertain and complex environments and that teachers’ behaviours are guided by
their thoughts, judgments and decisions. Thus, teachers need to be themselves, set
their own goals, and like artists, be the first to assess and critique their own products,
take some responsibilities for the success or failure of their own actions/inactions, and
chart new/remedial courses of action aimed at realizing the initial goals/objectives of
instruction (Darling-Hammond, Pease & Wise; 1983; Shavelson & Stern, 1981).
Summary, Conclusions, and Recommendations
The various definitions of teaching have been highlighted in this paper.
Generally, teaching has been viewed as an interaction between two parties who have
specific roles to play in the interaction process. Different conceptions of teaching
have also been presented and teaching has been conceptualized as a labour, a craft, an
art, the production of a product, a client-service, a profession, and as an enterprise.
The conceptualization of teaching as an art, and therefore, the teacher as an artist has
been elaborated on and analyzed in this paper. The implication of evaluating teaching
as an art has been discussed; and self-evaluation which is the major tool of artists to
achieve improvement in the trade has been presented and discussed. The merits and
concerns of self-evaluation have also been highlighted.
It is concluded that teachers can actually walk themselves in the path of not
only their enhancing professional growth, but also maximizing learning in
pupils/students that are placed in their charge if they employ the tool of self-
evaluation. This tool will enable them gather as much information as possible to
personally assess themselves on the job, identify any flaws, take some responsibilities,
and draw-up and follow certain corrective plans to realize predetermined personal and
organizational goals, all without external pressure or fear of sanction. Based on this
conclusion, it is hereby recommended that:
i) Teachers be encouraged to set their own personal goals for specified period
of time – weekly, monthly, termly and sessional

8. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCHOLARLY ACADEMIC INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY
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ii) Teachers be encouraged to verify on their own the realization of their personal
goal
iii) Teachers are required to write self-reports and submit these to their immediate
bosses.
iv) Ministries of Education and other supervising bodies should commission
studies aimed at producing teacher evaluation instruments (including one for
self-evaluation), and let these instruments be placed at the disposal of teachers.
References
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Bidwell, C. E. (1973). The social psychology of teaching. In E. M. Travers (Ed.),
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Darling-Hammond, L., Wise, A. E., & Pease, S. R. (1983). Teacher evaluation in the
organizational context: A review of literature. Review of Educational
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Gage, N. L. (1978). The scientific basis of the art of teaching. New York: Teachers
College Press.
Gronlund, N. E. (1985). Measurement and evaluation in teaching (5th
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Macmillan.
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Lewis, A. (1982). Evaluating educational personnel. Arlington, VA: American
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Formatted by Dr. Mary Alice Kritsonis, National Research and Manuscript
Preparation Editor, NATIONAL FORUM JOURNALS, Houston, TX
www.nationalforum.com