Joel Zehring

Doug Belshaw has quite a discussion going at his blog under the post Politics: the biggest problem in education. Doug posted kind of a sprawling piece that touches on business, government, administration, and even school vision.

I’m a believer in government being as small as possible: whilst the state needs to intervene in the ‘big picture’ of education, I think there are other organizations and bodies eminently more suitable to deal with assessment and examinations, for example.

I posted a couple of comments, because I’m fascinated by the “big picture” and how we develop a coherent vision that garners teacher buy-in. The short version of my idea: get the teachers together and lead them to develop their own vision for their school.

First, find the single common answer to three questions: 1. What are we deeply passionate about? 2. What can we do better than anyone in the world? 3. What drives our economic engine? Then, make everything your school does work toward that goal.

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?