Larry Ferlazzo reports on an interesting exchange about student ratings of teachers. Amanda Ripley, who is a cheerleader for corporate reform, loves the idea of trusting students to tell us which teachers are great and which stink.
Felix Salmon points out where she is wrong.
The Gates Foundation loves the idea of student surveys, of course, and several districts are already using them.
I personally have a lot of trouble with the idea of asking students to rate their teachers. It’s bad enough that teachers’ careers now hinge on their students’ test scores, but now they will be asked to win popularity contests. I don’t see this as a way to improve teaching but as a way to compel teachers to pander to students, to assign less homework, to inflate grades, and to seek student approval.
Why are so many people messing up teachers’ ability to teach?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am trying to understand how meaningful my second- graders’ evaluations will be. I remember when I first started teaching. Fresh from college, I knew I was going to be the biggest difference in their lives. I was going to shake up the school and be the most innovative teacher there. At the end of the year, I had my first-graders fill out an evaluation of me. You know, to make me even better as a teacher. The comments from my kids: we need more snack time/ recess time/ physical education time, etc.: all issues out of my control. I have ceased asking kids what I can do to improve my teaching.
That’s a pity. You might learn a lot about your teaching when you ask your students the right questions. These answers, however, may never, I repeat never be used by your employer to assess you. Under this condition, feedback from students can be very useful.
I think surveys are a good tool to look for patterns. There may be some extreme responses for good or bad, but when several patterns surface, it is wise to consider them. Then the challenge comes to change practice or continue in what has always been done.
I think older students might have a better grasp of this concept, though I know most students scream, cry and beg not to have me as their fifth grade teacher. But many years later, I’m still in touch with most of them. Go figure!
Are we going to consider the high schooler who wasn’t allowed to sleep during class and is pissed off at the teacher, the one who’s mother is suing the district because her little angel has failed five classes and has over twenty days of unexcused absences. When are the surveys going to be given out, after final exams are taken or the day before spring break. How about the day after a huge championship- the winning team school teacher survey might look very different than the down cast losing team school teacher survey. Teenagers are moody, hormonal and prone to change their opinions frequently. That does not mean they should not be listened to but they are not in the full position to judge the excellence of teaching- they don’t really know the underpinnings of how to set up a differentiated classroom for three different levels in one class so that no one in the class is aware of it. This would be excellent and remarkable pedagogy that would not be at all detectable by the students themselves as the very lack of discernment is signs of success.
Professionals- treat teachers like the professionals that they are.
PLEASE can we hold the HUMAN RESOURCES departments responsible for hiring bad teachers in the first place. Not everywhere do principals have the ability to cull the herd so to speak and then the bad apple is the one teacher that everyone holds as the exemplar for why there has to be such demoralizing mandates. I know I have been having this incredibily one sided conversations with several parents who don’t mind punishing the whole for the lack of professionalism of a small part.
I don’t believe that any teacher can be rated on a yearly basis, especially by students. The only real measure of their effectiveness is what has been retained by their students five, ten or more years later. Teaching itself is not the objective-it’s what you’ve allowed yourself to learn.
Absolutely not! I experimented with this after being misled by an instructor in a graduate class. It was a lesson self learned.
There are two big problems with surveys in general:
1. Many aren’t answered unless an incentive is provided.
2. Everybody lies.
When I taught college classes earlier in my career,I used to get sexually harassed a lot in my evals. While slightly flattering, it did not inform my instruction much.
We are required to give out student surveys at the end of the year. I stopped doing it a few years ago (and nobody seems to have noticed). The reason I stopped was that the feedback was mostly meaningless requests for more movies, class outside, no homework, less memorization (in a foreign language class).
When my students have a genuine problem, constructive criticism or suggestion, they have no problem coming to me.
I must disagree. I work in a school where I will be observed once (unless I request more observations because it will be almost impossible for me to attain the highest rating after being seen only once). An evaluation based on simply the number of minutes invites results that may or may not be valid. What to do? Who then knows the teacher best? Kids. They see what we do day in and day out. They know who cares and is doing good work. They aren’t stupid, remember? If you explain to them what criteria they are going to use to evaluate teachers with, they’ll be able to give insights that many adults might miss. This will be due to more time spent with the teacher and because they will often be far less jaded. The argument that teachers will be faced with a popularity contest if students’ opinions are counted belies a cynical view about the kids, and if a teacher is reduced to trying to be popular instead of being a teacher, then the kids will see that and should rightfully ding the teacher for it.
Dont’ get me wrong, the insanity of using the results of high-stakes standardized tests to evaluate us wrong and just a tool for politicians and those in education seeking to remove the humanity from the system. However, teachers should always be trying to improve, and one way is to gather information about one’s practice from multiple sources, one of which should be the students one teaches.
Of course students should be consulted. I have students write a reflection at the end of every year, and ask them for suggestions for what worked well and what didn’t. I sometimes use those suggestions. BUT, to base a teacher’s career and/or salary on the whims of kids, who, but nature, are immature, is ridiculous. If there’s concern that evaluators do not see enough of a teacher’s work, then evaluators need to see more of a teacher’s work. Simple as that. We need to assume the professionalism of teachers, instead of assuming that they are unprofessional unless proven by all these silly measures.
Student comments about teachers can be helpful (when taken in context and perspective). Student ratings can confuse issues and do great harm.
If I were to solicit comments from my students, I’d know I’d get a range. Many would say they liked the intellectual challenge of my courses. Some would say that (a) there was too much work or (b) it was boring. A few might offer constructive criticism.
I could gain some insights from these comments, but I’d also put them in perspective. A student who found my class “boring” might be comparing me to a teacher who showed many videos. A student who complained about the workload might have slipped behind early on and found it difficult to catch up. By the same token, a student who had only praises might be trying to please.
Now, if these were translated into ratings, I could easily end up with a B-rating or lower. Then the rating would be treated as a judgment. I would be under subtle or blatant pressure to please more of the kids.
This would also send a message to the kids that they had power over their teachers. They would know that if they wanted to get rid of a teacher (or, at the very least, cause trouble), all they needed to do was give him or her a low rating.
Of course there are wonderful teachers who are almost universally beloved, and subpar teachers who are almost universally disliked. But a wide range of teachers might be liked or disliked for the wrong reasons (or limited reasons, in any case).
In high school, some of my favorite teachers were among the least popular. One of the most frequent complaints was that they didn’t explain things clearly. Well, that’s part of what I appreciated about them: their lessons consisted of more than explanations, and they challenged us to think. (There were teachers who explained things very clearly and whom I also respected; they had a different sort of gift.)
Addendum: I meant this comment generally, not specifically. If I were to solicit comments from my students (past or present–but at the time I was teaching them), this is what I’d expect.
Another problem with student surveys is that they don’t allow for changing perspectives over time. Often we come to appreciate a teacher years after taking his or her class.
Two weeks from now we will be piloting a student survey for TN. Next year the evaluations will count for 5% of our composite evaluation; in Memphis they already count as 10% thanks to the educational acumen of Bill Gates.
We’ve been told the pilot evaluations will take 45 minutes. Besides concerns about the capriciousness of teenagers, even the most level-headed students aren’t going to take a survey that long seriously.
I use short, short- answer surveys at the end of each year. When kids take them seriously, they are a good tool for me. My survey, unlike those designed by the state, are specific to my class and not rife with edu-jargon.
Here in Connecticut, the new evaluation system will include use of parent, student, and/or peer surveys. I watched (on CTN) the Connecticut Board of Education discuss this provision. They were very pleased with themselves for giving “all stakeholders” a say.
Our district allows us to use parent and student surveys as one “data point” for our evaluation, although it is optional. The one year I attempted a parent survey, I got so few back (about 8 out of 30 students) that the results could not be use as a data point. How on earth can parent surveys be used to evaluate teachers when most parents won’t even return them?
At the college where I have taught for eighteen years, the administration decided back in January of 2010 to “tweak” the formula for tenure decisions and evaluations of adjuncts by increasing the weight of student evaluations. Their speaker repeatedly stated that we must adopt a “customer service” attitude. The problem is that we as a society have come to view education as an easily defined product and our students and their parents as customers. When I teach the survey, it is different than the other professors, hell, it is different than the last time I taught it. When it comes to evaluating my “performance,” I have a much better idea of what constitutes a successful educational outcome than my students. I usually don’t receive thanks until after they have progressed to upper division courses.
These surveys are just another tool to harass, micromanage, and otherwise de-professionalize our profession. For example, the current chair of my department mentioned that I “wasn’t providing personalized instruction” in my lower division courses. I reminded her that since I have been there we had seen the average size of a discussion section increase from approximately 20-25 students to five times as much.
Time and again, Felix Salmon really gets it. Whether he’s writing about the economy or education, he manages to see things others don’t and write about them in a very articulate, understandable way. Thanks for posting the link to his column.
NEASC, our region’s accreditation association, recommended among other things that faculty and staff do evals on administration. That happened once, and then they stopped doing it. What’s good for the goose is apparently not good for the gander.
I’ll take a student survey over a value added ranking or administrator stack ranking any day. At least the students have been in my classroom on a daily basis. If the questions are fair and the students aren’t asked to rank their teachers from best to worst, I don’t think it will turn into a popularity contest.
I think student feedback can be valuable from older students, but it should not be done at the end of the year with that teacher. The survey should be done at least a semester after the class is over, giving the student some additional perspective on the class.
The only ones left out of the evaluation process are: teachers evaluating their administrators and supervisors. University faculty are being eval. by deans and professors, in turn, eval. their deans. Many principals are so poor and create pathological and disfunctional school environments resulting in a mess – not productive for teachers and students. Teachers, as a group will not speak up, fear reprisal, worry about job security, are not comfortable with conflict, or just afraid. A systematic procedure of evaluating top down and bottom up is necessary. After all, we are all adults – treat us that way.
We were told by our accreditation association to do that very thing, but the administrators refuse.
My very first principal years ago was in charge of three buildings. My building saw him a grand total of twice during the entire school year. At the end of the year evaluation, my entire faculty marked “no basis for opinion” on most of the survey, since we felt we couldn’t really evaluate someone we’d barely seen. Our group was about one-fifth of his total faculty across three buildings. You would think that an administrator with that kind of evaluation wouldn’t continue to progress in the field. Wrong! A few years later he became the superintendant in a nearby district and later our state superintendent. No teacher would have been able to keep a job with evaluations like that, and yet he was promoted. Twice.
That is a very clear and welcome point, thank you.
As BrianG notes, colleges and universities have had student surveys for years. The quantitative ratings at my institution are a rough measure of student satisfaction, nothing more. The comments are the most valuable parts, I find, as long as you make a distinction between what students can comment on (their relationship with a faculty member, whether the faculty member helps them) and what students cannot comment on (whether their instructor knows the discipline, or the constraints they don’t know about).
As Salmon points out, a long nuanced survey crafted by Ronald Ferguson for professional development is being chopped into the least number of items most correlated with test scores, removing most of the value I’d see in the surveys.
Two short comments. The first is based on the very specific viewing angles of almost all the posters on this piece; the second, on the careful use of language.
As a former bilingual TA and SpecEd TA there is no one — I mean that literally — who sees the teachers they work with more than someone who works with them both day to day and year after year in the classroom. And to not omit the obvious: who also have an incredibly strong vested interest in the competence or incompetence of their professional coworkers. The judgment of an experienced paraeducator, who sees both the teacher and students interacting constantly, and the long range view such a person has because he/she has seen the changing nature of teacher and student interactions over time in just about every conceivable situation — is [in my experience] almost completely ignored. And folks are ruffled about student input? Why not that of the responsible adults who are there for many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours with the certified teaching staff? And teachers wonder why their professional experience and judgment is disregarded? Folks, I kid you not, we are all in this together, so if student input is up for discussion, why not that of paraeducators?
**Re consulting paraeducators: the only exception I ever experienced was an DDD [disruptive, destructive, demoralizing] administrator who wanted TAs to ‘snitch’ on the teachers they worked with in order to punish them for standing up for their students [mostly poor, ELL, Hispanic] and the parents of their students. Thankfully, no one I knew cooperated.**
On the use of language: the few advantages, and many disadvantages, of using students as evaluators of teaching staff is not what is really at issue. It is simply another example of turning parents and students into education “consumers” who will “buy” or “not buy” a particular “dispenser” of high test scores, letters of recommendation, etc . Teachers and school staff are not soft drinks that can be rated on a scale of one to ten, with the ‘tens’ being retained in the product line and the ‘ones’ discarded to make room for a new product line like TFA.
No need to think like the edudeformers or use their mangled educorporatespeak that is all the rage in the MSM.
I don’t think student evaluations would work. That being said I am a Pre-K teacher and 3 and 4 year olds love their teacher no matter what (That was not the same when I taught 5th grade.). I would get rave reviews each year I teach Pre-K. But that is not how I want to be rated. I am not about being popular, I am about being fair and educating my students so that they can in turn be productive thinking members of our society, not automatons. I want to be rated on my skill as a teacher, how far have I moved the children, what have they accomplished compared to their beginning of the year levels and abilities. J went from two word utterance with echolalia to speaking in short complete sentences of his own composure. P came in reading fluently at level E, but no comprehension – He left reading at G with comprehension. As far as I am concerned they both made huge strides from where they started. I don’t want to be evaluated on test scores because the January birthday child born to a well educated family who can afford tutoring will do far better on a standardized exam compared to a late December birthday born to a family who is struggling, working a few jobs, and may lack English language skills and the knowledge to help support their child in our public school system.
I also had the sad experience to see one of my favorite teachers in HS be drummed into retirement because of a lie told by a vengeful classmate who got busted forging his signature. How do we see through those?
How on earth would you begin to standardize student evaluations so they don’t go off the rails in either direction and are informative? Isn’t that the same question for teacher evaluation over all? How do we make it fair and unbiased for all teachers no matter what their classification or position? Not an easy task!
I think it’s important to survey students esp. in the middle upper grades; not only as one component in a teacher evaluation system, but also to provide important feedback to teachers, to help them improve their practice and also to improve schools and the system as a whole. Students are often amazingly honest about what subjects, methods and materials engaged them the most; irrespective of the grade they received. It would also be useful to ask students as to what conditions may have hindered their full participation in a particular class or the school as a whole, as well as parents and teachers on these very same issues. One part of the Gates surveys that is absurd is that they are planning to evaluate teachers on how well their students say the teacher keeps control of the class, engages them and/or addresses their needs w/out also analyzing or asking about conditions in the classroom that might affect those results.
You know who we’d like to rate? Parents. You get an “A” if you’re child misses less than 8 days of school (we have students with 34, 36, and 64 days of absence in a single year). You get an “A” if you’re child is on time (we have students who are NEVER on time). You get an “A” if you’re child completes their homework (we give out detention everyday to students who fail to do their homework). You get an “A” if you don’t hang up when we call. You get an “A” if your child doesn’t come to school smelling like a combination of weed and cat piss.
Does that seem like too much to ask?
I’d give the above behavior a C or B at best! Aren’t those the basics? Kidding. I completely empathize with your experience and your appeal for assistance from home. The fact is, our job is greatly hampered by the things you mention, but also by a general distrust of teachers, teaching and school. Often I feel like school — what we learn, the ways we learn, the importance placed on the things mandated by state and local curriculum– is foreign to our students’ life outside of school. Rather than being the community center for learning, I feel school is becoming irrelevant.
Why are so many people messing up teachers’ ability to teach?
So that computers can replace us. They’re cheap, compliant, hard working, efficient and do what they’re told. They are the perfect EdReform teacher.
I have been thinking about this for a few days now. And would be interested in your response to my comment, particularly as this thread is related to my dissertation that I am currently writing. One question that constantly comes to mind when reading your posts is the degree to which you believe these policies are bad for evaluative purposes, or just bad strategies to use in general. Using student evaluations as an example, I am not sure if you believe that student evaluations are bad for summative purposes only, or if you also believe that that are bad for formative purposes as well. I think disentangling these two components is extremely important in any sort of discussion, as they have important consequences for how people view these strategies in general. While I have yet to read through the literature enough on using student evaluations for summative purposes, I am fairly versed in how they can be used for formative purposes.
For formative purposes, student evaluations are good for two primary reasons. First, they do provide useful information for the teacher, as how student perceive what is going on in a classroom is extremely important, not only for their academic skills (not just achievement), but also for the their social and emotional development (preliminary findings from my dissertation). There is a great deal of variability within classrooms on what students actually perceive, and student evaluations provide useful information in understanding that variability. Second, student evaluations can also be a great motivator. Using most motivational theories, student autonomy and decision-making is extremely important for student success. When I pass out student surveys about instruction (in my actual dissertation study, or for my own teaching – when I taught first graders, undergraduates and in-service teachers), student surveys provide a tool for students to become a greater part of the decision-making process and feel as though their voices are being heard. This was particularly true during my dissertation study, the students were extremely excited that they were able to evaluate their teachers and provide some sort of voice to their learning (I did my study in two schools with over 90% free and reduced lunch). I will also say that they still scored the teacher higher than what I scored the teacher when observing them using the same dimensions. Thus, I believe that student evaluations can be used as a great tool for formative evaluations of teachers if they are done properly, and this should be brought into the conversation. We should not throw away a useful tool because policy makers want to use it inappropriately, but rather push back with the utility and validity purposes of those tools.
It is well and good to suggest that there is a better way to use student evaluations. The reality is that they will be used as part of the evaluation of whether teachers should get a bonus or be fired. That’s harmful and stupid.
Hmm. I’d say the students’ opinions need to be tempered somewhat. When I was trying to introduce my ninth grade students to project-based learning, many rebelled in my honors classes. They rightly concluded that the shift would be more “work” for them and they resented me for it. I got quite a lot of negative feedback from them, many who thought I wasn’t doing my job. I shudder to think if they had had any power over my future as an educator…