Bringing back the student voice

Memphis recently approved a new teacher evaluation system that incorporates, among other factors like test scores and principal observations, student ratings of effectiveness. As we move towards systems that put so much weight on student performance, why shouldn't we factor in student feedback on their day-to-day classroom experience?

Emerging research would suggest we should. A NYT article on the Gates Teaching Effectiveness study reported that "teachers whose students described them as skillful at maintaining classroom order, at focusing their instruction and at helping their charges learn from their mistakes are often the same teachers whose students learn the most in the course of a year, as measured by gains on standardized test scores." These findings were based on a survey instrument developed by Ron Ferguson, here at Harvard GSE and indicate that students know more about the quality of their educations than we often give them credit for. See the MET briefing for the full details.

Surely, students shouldn't be the only arbiters of value here. We should measure in-classroom practice and growth through observations and we shouldn't throw out the tests. Student ratings won't always be fair in all cases and work should be done to make sure the way we ask questions links up to what we need to know (there has been some questions raised about independent sites like ratemyteacher.com, where ratings are obtusely broad and superficial... see Ferguson's tripod project here for what the current assessment looks like), but they should be a factor in helping us triangulate performance. If we all think back to our own experiences, we knew when we were being pandered to and we knew when we were being pushed and supported. 

Memphis is actually one of the partner districts for the Gates project, so I guess it isn't too much of a surprise that they're trying some new approaches. Future iterations of the Memphis model may also find ways to bring in parent ratings too, which would be great.

I'm excited to see other districts try this. Let's bring the voice of the end-user into our assessments of success.