Part of being a professional, rather than just having a job, is continually striving for improvement, and we are always looking for ways to do this as individuals, but also systemically. One thing that we are going to develop over the next few months is a robust, reliable and manageable system of collecting student feedback on teachers. This is a total departure from my own schooling, where student opinion was neither valued nor sought, but education has come on a long way in recent years, and we now know that “Students are able to report on teachers with a high degree of reliability. Student ratings of teachers have been found to be better predictors of student [academic] attainment than teacher self-assessment and Principal assessments of effectiveness”
This quote is taken from an Australian context, so we can adapt it to our context, and seek information from students which triangulates with test scores, teachers observations and professional judgements. And of course, we know that many of our teachers already use anonymous questionnaires or other means of eliciting feedback. But the key point here, and one that I hope is a welcome one for parents, is that we intend to build systems to intentionally find out from students what they feel is working, and what they feel is not. Correctly done, this will be empowering for teachers and students alike, and we hope will be another positive step in creating the open and constructive dialogue that will lead to most learning.
The details are work-in-progress – with each student having (say) 8 teachers and each teacher having up to 150 students, we want to avoid survey overload! We’ll keep you informed, but in the meantime, if you want to know more, here is a summary example of the research we are reading.
References
Jensen, B and Reichl, J. 2011. Better teacher appraisal and feedback: Improving performance. Grattan Institute, Melbourne (available from www.grattan.edu.sg)
