Can students evaluate teachers? (part 2 of 2)

Last week I argued that student evaluation of teachers is deeply problematic, but I also acknowledged the pressing moral need to give students some input into the way they are taught.  I perhaps did not emphasis enough another reason - the sheer pragmatic value in getting data for (not on) teachers.  But there's one caveat there - it has to be formative feedback that teachers can actually use to get better.  That's totally different to summative feedback such as a 1-10 rating on 'how good the teacher is', that is next to useless in actually making things better. So this week I want to say a little bit about the approach we have taken.

[Firstly let me note that getting information from students about what's working happens all the time informally - via exit slips, through formative assessments, in ongoing conversations etc - here I want to discuss the formal mechanisms]

In last week's post I argued that we need to find out how much students are learning; not how much they like the teacher - because teaching should be centered around learning, not liking. But we cannot just ask students to rate their learning as 

• they do not really know standards to apply (they are learning, after all) 
• they are prone to all sorts of biases, like us all 
• it can lead to distorted incentives for teachers.  

And in any case, we can often use academic assessments to tell what students have learnt.

But there is something pretty close to learning that we can ask about, that

• students will know about, and can offer meaningful information on
• is less subject to bias
• creates the right incentives for teacher

I am talking about asking students about the conditions for learning - that is, what conditions need to be in place for students to succeed, and which the teacher is responsible for creating.  We call these our learning principles and are based in a great deal of research; you can see them in this link or in graphic here.  

Asking students about the extent to which these Learning Principles
 are being met for them is a great way for me to evaluate my teaching

So here is the full questionnaire* about what we ask - as you can see, it's closely linked to what we know makes good learning.  Each student is asked to fill this in, anonymously, and then what's really important here is what we do with the information. 

At risk of boring the non-educators reading this, here's the sort of feedback students give* - this one from my grade 12 class last academic year. and you can see how useful it is because:

• there's qualitative and quantitative data;
• I can see how individuals are feeling by scanning horizontally
• I can see what's going well, and where I need to do better.  

Here, I could see from columns G and I that I needed to think about creating time for students to develop and practice skills, and also about how I give feedback to students.  So I opened up a conversation with the class to ask what might help, and together we made focussed, targetted adjustments.  To my mind, this shows far more genuine respect for students as agents of their own learning than simply asking them to evaluate their teachers; and it also provided tangible, specific improvements. It works, in short.

For me, there's also the culture that systems reflect and create.  Teacher evaluations run the risk of encouraging a client-service model, where students learn the sense of entitlement that a customer in a restaurant might feel.  It seems to me that a partnership model is much healthier - it teachers students to take shared responsibility for their learning, develops trust, and leads to better outcomes (here are a few more thoughts related to that idea).

So this is, I think, a way of getting the benefits of student evaluation of teachers without the downsides.  It's a formative process that aims to help teachers improve, rather than just ranks teacher for appraisal purposes.  It's not actually that hard, but it requires a change of mindset, from students evaluating teachers to collaborating with them to improve things. 

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*note that each year we tweak the questions slightly, so the current questionnaire does not entirely align with the example of feedback.  With our current focus on student wellbeing we also took the chance to triangulate other findings with a question aboyt how students are feeling in class.