Should Students Help to Assess Teacher Performance?
The Gates Foundation says yes. Heber Diaz agrees. As part of Michelle Rhee's Youth Cabinet at the DC Public Schools (DCPS), high school student Heber Diaz helped create a pilot to incorporate student input in teacher assessments.
Who spends more time with teachers other then their own students? When observing the student learning experience in a classroom, our outlook on teacher effectiveness may be the most important part.
I am a senior at Columbia Heights Education Campus In Washington, DC. During my junior year in high school, I had the privilege of serving on former Chancellor Michelle Rhee's Youth Cabinet. The Cabinet was composed of a diverse group of high school students from schools across the district, and we met with the chancellor every month. The general idea was to give actual students an opportunity to advise the chancellor on different aspects of our educational experience in a DCPS high school, including the effectiveness of our teachers.
Based on my experience as a student and on the Youth Cabinet, I think having youth advisors is a positive step towards finding new ways to perhaps assess teachers
Last year the Cabinet had to come up with a project to present to Chancellor Rhee. After we convinced her of the need for student feedback in teacher evaluations, she divided us into groups, and each group created a survey that students would take about the teachers at their schools. The survey included questions about the teacher's teaching, the student's learning experience in the class, the teacher's availability and other factors in teacher effectiveness.
We distributed the surveys at our schools anonymously and with the permission of some teachers (they wouldn't be included in teacher assessments until later). Each cabinet member then got to sit with their teachers to review the results of the surveys. The teachers were able to receive feedback from their students. Our groups combined our results to come up with conclusions, thoughts and suggestions and presented them to the chancellor.
This was what I found most interesting: for each teacher, the majority of the students answered almost the exact same way for each question. This was a good sign that we had reliable data. The results told us a lot about what students felt, but this way we could see the feelings objectively. Other students outside of the Cabinet were also able to express their perceptions of their teachers. Their experience with teachers mattered.
People may argue that having students assess teachers is not a good idea-that they may carry out their evaluations based on personal feelings towards the teacher. While creating these surveys we thought and talked about these issues and addressed them in a few ways.
We decided to create the questions with a comment section (for every question) for the students to explain their ratings. By having this comment section, we were able to see why the students rated the way they did.
We were also able to tackle this issue with the type of questions that were asked in the survey. We added questions that weren't necessarily personal to the teacher or the student. For example, one of the questions that my particular group had was "How much non-learning time is wasted in class?" The students were to choose from a scale of 1 through 10, 1 being little to none, and 10 being a lot. Some broke it down into minutes to be more specific. This type of question is focused on the observations of the learning experience of the class, not on a particular personality trait of the teacher.
Usually, teacher evaluations take place when a principal or a school administrator chooses certain days of the school year to sit in on the class and observe the teacher. But one day does not count for every single day of the school year, and teachers can be nervous or act differently if an administrator is there. Students, on the other hand, spend every day learning from them hence, observing them.
Plus, even the most effective teachers may have days that are not of excellent teaching. Or ineffective teachers may have good days. What happens if these teachers are observed on one of these days? Does it make them effective or ineffective? Students' help in assessing teachers may be a solution to this long-lasting challenge.
I have to say, what other teacher-evaluation is better than that of the student being taught? We spend 10 months of the year in the classroom, and our perception is dependable and genuine when it comes to teacher effectiveness.
