When I taught at Middlesex County College, student
evaluation forms were always issued along with the final exam.
I thought, by enlarge, the results were a fair distribution
of positive and negative remarks.
(BTW - These all were anonymous evaluations and not used by
the administration to grade instructors - as far as know anyway)
One thing I liked about the form was the section asking
about the student's efforts. This too, generally resulted in a fair
distribution of honest responses. Often a student indicated a serious lack of
effort on his part but still didn't criticize the instructor as the reason for
his poor grade. I hope that the same kinds of questions will appear every proposed student / teacher evaluation form (but I'm not confident that they will).
And , remember, the evaluations of which I'm speaking were written by mature
adults, not children!
Now, let me get back to the editorial.
One of the statements reads as follows:
"Kids do know what makes a good teacher. And it's not a
mystery why they'd know better than trained adults...".
Well if this is true, than -
Why do we need well paid administrators to observe and
evaluate teachers?
Why do we need the "Educrats" at the NJDOE to tell
teachers when, what and how to teach children.
Why to we need
politicians to continually pass legislation instructing teachers when, what and
how to teach children?
Let's just leave teachers to their task and then accept the
children's evaluations as the indicator
of the teacher's success. We would no longer have to spend all the time and
money needed by these other evaluation methods and would get a better result
than that provided by "trained adults".
And, since we are talking about evaluations of teachers by
their charges, why not have teachers evaluate their administrators and
supervisors?
While we're at it, why not have local administrators evaluate the honchos at NJDOE ?
This way we could a true picture of what's going on in NJ
education and in the case of the DOE, I'm not so sure that it would be a pretty
picture!
What do you think?
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