Why not? They grade us, why can’t we grade them?
Grades are a reflection of a student’s work, progress and achievement-- they’re a way of providing students guidance about future course work— a form of feedback to “motivate” students. If grading is as efficient as they claim it is and makes us, students, “better”, lets reciprocate; lets return teachers their own favor and give them grades to make them better as well! After all, one never stops learning right? Teachers classify students among themselves, as being either “good”, “bad” or “mediocre”— they’re not the only ones. we classify you teachers too, and some of you are not meeting our expectations. Policy makers on both sides of the aisle haven’t yet emboldened enough to state the obvious; they remain oblivious to the truth: there are some bad teachers in our school. I’ve actually had about five I can list from the top of my head . Last year, this one teacher’s class I’d actually call “free period”— it was that inefficient. No one learned, yet still no one complained. After all, you could walk up to him, have him “check” your work again, without having made any corrections after the last time he’d given you feedback, insist, no, not even that, just plainly say you made the changes and BOOM, grade raised. Those of you who were in this teacher’s class, you know who I’m talking about. A study by Stanford University economist, Eric Hanushek, found that the difference between a child being assigned to one teacher or another can make a difference of as much as a grade level’s worth of learning during the school year. This idea of giving your teacher a grade, is majorly for feedback; to ensure students are getting a high quality education. This new system could start out as an online anonymous survey at the middle of the school year, where students rate their professors from 1 to 5 in the categories of clarity, helpfulness, popularity, and easiness— a comment box could be added. All responses should be accessible to the principal (not the teachers) including the person who took the survey’s name. This would prevent nasty and disrespectful comments, students grading their teacher higher with hopes of getting a better grade and students that graded poorly being treated differently. Leila Campbell, a humanities teacher at Charter High School in Oakland, California, had received her results from a recent survey. She discovered her difficulty connecting with students. Since then, Ms. Campbell adjusted her classroom manner, resulting in an evident improvement. “The surveys have been transformational in how I operate, I’ve grown tremendously from this data”, she claimed. It’s a revolutionary idea, like Ronal Ferguson, an economist at Harvard, claimed. No one is more qualified to evaluate teachers’ work, than the people who see them every day—their students.
4 Comments
Bon
9/5/2015 09:02:00 am
Daniela, you hit the nail on the head in the conclusion. The best professional development a teacher can get is through student feedback. I've been teaching for 10+ years now and vouch for that. Going back to the issue you had with this teacher, I think it's very important that students speak out. This blog post is a start, but the best thing you can do is address the matter with the teacher. I know it might be daunting to do so, but it's also genuine. Surveys help too, but dialogue is key. I can tell you that if it were me, I'd really appreciate you talking to me face to face. This is a powerful blog post because it shows how self-aware you are. So ask yourself, what are you going to do about it?
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Ines
9/5/2015 03:11:23 pm
I completely agree with your point. If grades help students grow so much, why should teachers be afraid to receive some themselves? When I read your quote, "Those of you who were in this teacher’s class, you know who I’m talking about.", I smiled, because I did know who you were talking about. As to your writing skills: you're great at getting your point across clearly and logically, and I find it interesting which words you decide to emphasise.
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Chris Akin
9/7/2015 04:19:42 pm
Daniela, I absolutely LOVED this post! I think your writing was fluid and powerful - you really made some key points.
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Bill Cotter
9/8/2015 06:29:11 pm
I really liked this post Daniela. I think we should prototype your feedback idea in the IA. I am curious about your five categories. How did you choose them? I think it would be great to prototype your categories as well as see what other categories students would want ot score teachers in, I am imagining a simple feedback sheet that students can turn in at the end of class based off a post I saw on 4.0 schools: http://4pt0.org/2014/08/19/what-a-dinner-experiment-taught-me-about-school/
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Daniela Ontaneda16 year old Junior at Colegio Franklin Delano Roosevelt who's taking the IB diploma program. Archives
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Future Blog Posts:
-Free to Learn by Peter Gray reflection
- If you could change someone's life - If you could change one thing about yourself - Should students be allowed to grade their teacher - What happens after death? - Are precognitions and deja vu different? - Mysteries of the mind - Mentalism - The positive of experiencing pain - What is existentialism -Impact of media on society |