Transformational classroom leadership: a novel approach to evaluating classroom performance

In higher education, student evaluation of teaching is widely used as a measure of an
academic’s teaching performance despite considerable disagreement as to its value. This paper
begins by examining the merit of teaching evaluations with reference to the factors influencing
the accuracy of the teaching evaluation process. One of the central assumptions on which
student evaluation of teaching is based is that there is a relationship between student
achievement and student rating of teachers. However, the findings of the majority of studies
do not support this assumption. The absence of a strong link between student achievement and
teaching evaluations suggests that there is scope for examining other approaches to measuring
effective classroom dynamics. This paper presents such an approach based on the notion of
transformational classroom leadership.