Background to the Study
School-based managers and educators play a key role in the provision of quality of teaching through continuous improvement. Experts of modern forms of supervision believe that higher levels of performance tend to depend more on the educator becoming more responsible for his/her development (McGhee & Stark, M. D., 2021). However, research shows that many countries including South Africa are faced with challenges of poor quality of teaching because of implementing traditional supervision and evaluation approaches associated with threats, terrorisation, fault finding, ill-treatment, criticisms, harshness and strict control (Umalusi report, 2007, p. 8 Biputh, & McKenna, 2010, p. 284) are of the opinion that such type of approaches characterised by bureaucratic and dictatorial managerial structures retard professional development and continuous improvement. Basing on this literature analysis, this study was motivated to further examine supervision and evaluation in the aspect of self-directed supervision and self-evaluation as linked to teacher and learner performance in the context of the South African education system. The Self-directed supervision model (Abdullah, 2019.) and IQMS self-evaluation as the main areas of this study can be well understood and described after elaborating controversial aspects of teacher development in the following paragraph.
In the first place, one of the issues among many researchers is whether supervision and evaluation mean the same or not or whether they should be separated or not (Nolan, 2005, p. 26). Sidhu and Fook (2010) in their study found that in Malaysia, a majority of teachers interviewed, did not know the difference between teacher evaluation and teacher supervision. What they found happening in schools was conventional supervision (inspection) while formative (developmental) supervision was hardly practised (Sidhu & Fook (2010). Most supervision studies agree that evaluation systems are characterised by judgemental approaches on performance while supervision pays more attention to promoting teacher development and performance improvement by initiating commitment, inspiration, and motivation (Zepeda, 2017). This view gives a basic background of how this study *pursues* the self-directed supervision process as compared to the IQMS self-valuation process to be discussed in the sections to come. In the context of the South African education system, the current IQMS teacher evaluation system is characterised by the Developmental Appraisal system (DAS), Performance measurement system (PMS) and whole School Evaluation (WSE) which are all aimed at improving the quality of teacher performance (IQMS Manual, 2003). Self-evaluation is one of the performance evaluation processes applied during the IQMS implementation process.