Why Students Should be Involved in Teacher Evaluations
Question; who spends the most time with students? Answer; students! So why is it that students are continuously excluded from teacher evaluations? Students have the most accurate understand their teachers teaching capabilities.They should be filling out teacher evaluations.The best teachers inspire interest, connect with students, explain what is being taught so that all students understand, creates a positive, inclusive environment, etc. Students get the first-hand experience of teachers capabilities and should be included in teacher evaluations.
There are many holes in the wall that’s teacher evaluations.Currently schools are relying on grades from standardized tests and administration watching a class.Using only these methods will lead to a broken school.Grades are only one head on the hydra that is good teaching.Standardized tests have been proven to be harmful to students, and teachers are “on their best behavior” when administrators are evaluating, making it impossible to get an accurate understanding of teacher’s everyday abilities. “.
..we need a constellation of measures to accurately reflect teachers’ multifaceted roles of teaching, affecting students learning, bolstering student motivation, supporting colleagues and providing service to the school”, Huffington Post, Teachers Should be Evaluated like Students: Here’s Why agrees that an improvement is necessary for schools.Many districts nowadays are incentive paying teachers to outperform their colleagues causing teachers to turn against each other, to the student’s expense. “It takes a village” applies to schools as well. If students were able to evaluate teachers, administration would know right away if students’ education was compromised.
A tech-startup, Panorama has a scientifically valid survey covering a variety of factors for amazing teaching. When used at a charter school in California, the results were immensely helpful to the faculty. A teacher there scored well in most areas but was shocked to find out how poorly she did on questions like, “I feel comfortable asking my teacher for help” and “My teacher really cares about me”. Since finding this out she said, “The surveys have transformed how I operate, I’ve grown tremendously from this data.”Some claim that it would cost too much, take too much time.
Panorama has created a free student survey used in 5,000+ schools. The surveys don’t take long to fill out and if schools have ineffective teachers the time is already being wasted, it’s worth checking.The information is out there, studies done, data collected, it’s time for action. There’s no reason not to want to better schools. There’s a simple solution being handed to schools on a silver platter.
If you don’t have the authority to make this improvement talk to the school board. Panorama has provided a free and simple solution to feed you with. Take a bite. Works Cited Gehlbach, Hunter. “Teachers Should Be Evaluated Like Athletes: Here’s Why.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 2 July 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/hunter-gehlbach/teachers-should-be-evaluated_b_1643211.html. Manjoo, Farhad.
“Grading Teachers, With Data From Class.” The New York Times, The New YorkTimes, 3 Sept. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/technology/students-grade-teachers-and-a-start-up-harnesses-the-data.
html. “Validity Breif: Panorama Student Survey.” Panorama Education, 2015, pp. 1–10.,panorama-www.s3.amazonaws.com/files/panorama-student-survey/validity-brief.pdf.
