Voting As Part Of Teacher Evaluations
2 min read
Over at the Innovative Educator, Lisa Nielsen has a post about teacher evaluation via student voting. My reply morphed into this post.
A student voice in teacher evaluations would be a great thing. Really, creating more mechanisms for meaningful student involvement would be a great thing.
But students aren't "clients" any more than teachers are "service providers." That type of pseudo-business language infests some of the conversation about education reform. Education is not a point of sale, and rhetoric suggesting otherwise simplifies the relationships that can and do exist between teacher and student.
Students do educate themselves, but a teacher isn't just a piece of the furniture, or a salesperson. A good teacher - one attuned to the differing needs of students in their classrooms - knows how to reach individuals. And accordingly, not every student will be a good match for every teacher, and vice versa. And we need to have an evaluation system where that reality is okay.
While voting as one element of evaluation seems like an interesting idea, I'd rather see a system where students expressed themselves using actual words. Voting implies a pre-selected set of options that actually limit the range of their expression.
And, of course, any evaluation system that has just a single facet is flawed by design. And as a final note, I would love to see teacher evaluation include elements like developing, collaborating on, and releasing open content.
Image Credit: "Vote" taken by Vaguely Artistic, published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.
