An Evaluation That Teachers Can Use

A post from Jay Wamsted at Education Post (yes, that Education Post--I've said it before and I'll say it again--it's important to read from all over the edu-web) got me thinking about the sources of feedback that teachers can tap. He tells a story about a missed moment in which someone offered him feedback on his teaching that he didn't want to hear, and how he regrets that missed opportunity.

Which I get. I suspect most teachers who have been doing the work more than five years get it. Because the system so rarely gives us feedback we can use, teachers hunker down into a cycle of reflection and self-evaluation, and that is a great and beautiful thing, but it has its drawbacks. Teachers can fall into a despair spiral ("I should have handled that differently today and I also didn't get that student what they needed and I'm a week behind on papers and oh my god did I just choose the wrong profession??")

Teachers can also get into a place where outside feedback hits like a bucket of cold water and our back goes up and our claws come out. That's what happened to Wamsted. It happened to me, a bit differently. It was very early in my career. I was teaching ninth graders, and at the beginning of a unit doing a preliminary check what knowledge they had to bring to the table. And at some point, students said, "Mr. Greene, we don't know any of that stuff. They never taught us that in middle school."

Except, here's the thing--I had just switched teaching positions that year. I had been one of their middle school teachers. I knew damn well what I had taught them, and it had included the stuff they claimed to have never heard of before. My first impulse was to blame those damned kids. Heck, my second impulse was to blame those damned kids. But eventually I had to wrestle with the fact that I had apparently completely biffed that part of their middle school education.

I came up with a tool, which is why Wamsted caught my attention, because he's thinking about the same idea. I started doing annual anonymous student end-of-course evaluations.

It was one page. Some portions were just simple circle-the-number rating responses. Some were open-ended. I asked questions about the course content--too hard, too easy, useful, not useful? What should there be more or less of? I asked questions about my own classroom presence- do you think the teacher knows what he's talking about? Cares? Wastes your time? Is fair? I asked them to rate both the difficulty and usefulness of specific units from the year. I invited them to write anything they wanted to on the back.

I learned from these, every year. It was not always easy to read, but it helped me to tweak and modify both the course content and my own performance in the classroom. I didn't always come across the way I thought I did. I didn't always make the point of the content clear.And I could argue that what I did should have been good enough to get The Point across, but if it didn't, well, then, it wasn't, really. One effect I didn't think about until I was poring through the responses--the evaluations absolutely hammered home to me, as a writing teacher, that numbers and rubrics are great, but nothing sticks with people like written out sentence-form responses. Also, the process of creating the form was useful (though as one more form of reflection and self-evaluation).

The students were never jerks about this process. In all those years, no student ever just hammered me just to strike back; at most a few just didn't fill it out. But they took it seriously. I know the expectation/fear is that students who did poorly or hated the class or hated you will make a mockery of the process, but that didn't happen. I suspect that this has to do with the type of relationship and trust you've built with your class, and if they do abuse the process, that is in itself feedback.

And I still kept my head about some feedback--I reserved the right to decide the student was wrong ("You should sing more often," suggested on student. That student was wrong.) As with any other feedback in life, what others see and say has to be weighed about what you know yourself.

But I realized, looking back, that those sheafs of papers that sat in my desk drawer where  could pull them out and look from year to year to year--those were the most useful evaluations I ever had. I had the standard formal battery of observations along with the assorted paperwork and folderol that went with them, and they were never unpleasant, but they were never much help, either. I even had administrators in some years who would do the smart unofficial style--roam the hall, pop a head in to watch (I know that bugs the heck out of some people but I never minded a principal just popping in), keep an ear to the ground. It's was supportive and bolstering and made me feel that I was doing okay, and that's not nothing. But it wasn't feedback that helped me grow.

So I encourage Mr. Wamsted and others to take the student course evaluation plunge. It won 't tell you everything, and it won't always be exactly what you need to hear, but I don't think you'll ever regret it.