Joel Zehring

I just finished talking with a student teacher who is wrapping up her “take-over” time in second grade. Now that she’s off active duty for a few weeks, she’s checking out other classrooms before finishing out the semester. Of course, I welcomed her to visit, with one request.

Give me feedback on my class, my lesson, my interaction with my students, and anything else you observe.

Constructive feedback based on empirical observation is hard to come by in elementary education. I’m going to request it from whomever I can. Plus, this teacher-in-training may have some insights and suggestions that are new to me. The trenches of teaching aren’t always conducive to researching new practices.

As a bonus, the student teacher gets to experience a little bit of real professional learning community. Instead of being talked down to, she gets to flex her collaboration muscles and contribute to my students’ learning by helping me to run a better class.

All she did was announce that Conversations was starting in three hours. The topic: teacher evaluations. That’s about all it took for me to start brainstorming a few ideas that have been rattling around in my head about how we assess teacher performance. Specifically, I wonder if we can involve others in the process of providing constructive feedback to teachers.

Why don’t I ask my students more often what they think of my teaching? For that matter, what do they think of me as their teacher? College students have been rating their professors for some time now. Harry Hude, whom I have previously celebrated as one of my favorite teachers, has solid average ratings in “Clarity” and “Helpfulness” as judged by 15 students (alleged students). His overall quality is somehow calculated as 4.9 out of five points. His “Hotness Total” is zero, for whatever that’s worth.

Did I mention the K-12 version, Rate My Teachers? I would guess these sites will only get more popular. If it’s coming, are we as teachers ready to address the issue of student evaluation? Are we willing to incorporate student evaluations into our daily practice?

Here’s an action step. Create a small quarter-page slip of paper with some points of lesson evaluation. Make copies and hand a paper to a student for each lesson you teach. Make sure that every student gets to fill out an evaluation form every 2 or 3 weeks. Here are some possible evaluation questions:

• What was the objective of this lesson?
• On a scale of 1-5, how interesting was this lesson?
• What was the most fun part of this lesson?
• Which part of the lesson was most boring?
• Was there anything confusing about this lesson?
• What could Mr. Z do differently to make this lesson better?