SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Out of the mouths of babes

There’s an article in this month’s Atlantic Magazine that recommends an ingenious education reform - namely, ask students for their opinions about how good their teachers are. It sounds kind of simplistic, I know, but it turns out that students’ ratings do strongly correlate with student learning. 

“Measures Effective Teaching”, a massive survey by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, found that student responses do “indeed help predict which classes would have the most test-score improvement at the end of the year. In math, for example, the teachers rated most highly by students delivered the equivalent of about six more months of learning than teachers with the lowest ratings….Students were better than trained adult observers at evaluating teachers. This wasn’t because they were smarter but because they had months to form an opinion, as opposed to 30 minutes. And there were dozens of them, as opposed to a single principal.”

It turns out that the following five items correlate mostly strongly with student learning.

• Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.
• My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.
• Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.
• In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.
• In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes.

At a time when education reformers are realizing just how important good teachers are, this tool may turn out to be a very important arrow in their quiver. H/T JB