Illustration by Grace Schafer-Perry
Around this time of year, adjuncts, instructors, lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors, and full professors at colleges and universities across the country ask their students for feedback via course evaluations. Many of them have even more job security than high school teachers.
Why is it, then, that they are so keen on improving their teaching as to ask their students for feedback, when our teachers are not? It has to do with tradition. When a college student receives a course evaluation form, they are not surprised. When a college student is offered extra credit to complete that form, they remain unfazed.
However, when a high school student receives a course evaluation form, they are left confused as to why their teacher is so unusual. When a high school student sees that this anonymous survey is so important to the teacher that they have made it a graded assignment, they are puzzled. When they realize that the assignment is such that anyone who even clicks through the survey can get one hundred percent on that assignment, they may be overjoyed. Course evaluations are expected, or even required, in the context of higher education, whereas they are nearly unheard of in secondary schools.
The system in place for feedback is lacking. If a teacher is under review for some reason, a colleague or administrator might drop in their classroom for a day or so to observe their teaching. However, these brief drop-ins can’t possibly be representative of their teaching. Students could easily provide better feedback for their teachers than other teachers because students are in such classrooms everyday. Teachers who hope to improve their teaching hope to do so in order to benefit their students. Thus, their students should be their first and foremost source of feedback.
Rather than failing to support teachers, school districts such as our own should provide meaningful avenues for students to give them feedback so that they can improve their teaching. This is part of what it should mean to be a beloved community.
Let’s make like a community driven by passion, pride, and purpose, keen on supporting its students, and encourage teachers to ask their students for feedback on their teaching. Vicki Davis, of the George Lucas Educational Foundation’s Edutopia, suggests that teachers host end-of-year focus groups for students and record their conversation, send out end-of-year surveys with Google Forms, and encourage students to leave anonymous notes containing feedback for her on her desk at anytime.
The Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching also recommends similar avenues for teachers to solicit feedback from their students including in-class feedback forms and other online surveys. A third website called We Are Teachers offers a Teacher Professional Development article with “5 Tips for Getting Feedback From Students.”