When I was teaching Communications for Teachers in the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I asked a question at the first class meeting: How long does it take you to decide whether a teacher is any good?
Some didn’t want to answer, apparently afraid of what my answer might be and eager to tell the teacher what he wants to hear. I had to reassure them that there was no definitive answer. Students at CU routinely answer an anonymous end-of-course questionnaires about how effective they found their teachers. Those responses vary widely, from condemnation to a suggestion that the teacher should be chairman of the department.
Every chair of a department can look at the questionnaires and have a fair idea of the quality of the teaching in any given class. I taught at CU for 23 years and I never had a chair of the departments of Education, Communication, or Theatre and Dance in my classrooms. All they needed to know was the opinion of the students. But in K-12 schools, the opinion of students is rarely solicited.
In the days of one-room schools, teachers were one-man bands, doing it all. A few still exist and they still have fewer problems with teachers and students than bigger schools. My father began his education that way, and he earned three degrees. Why is that? The teacher knew the children and their parents well. They talked to each other and they both knew the progress and the demeanor of the students, in school and out. Their education was personal, geared toward the student’s strengths and focusing on improving weaknesses.
Good teachers recognize individual differences. But when a teacher has 30 students in a fourth-grade class — many of whom cannot afford lunch and who have had insufficient sleep and no breakfast, who come from broken homes or whose home lives surround them with people who aren’t interested enough to go to parent-teacher meetings — the teacher has problems for which there is no solution. The parents teachers want and need to talk to don’t come to parent-teacher meetings, one of many ironies in our public school systems.
Every student is unique. There has never been anyone exactly like them before and there will never be anyone like them again, ever. The same is true of every living thing. Every student has different desires, needs and problems. Each has different strengths and different weaknesses. Teacher effectiveness using data obtained by testing is not only useless, it’s insulting. It assumes that every student in every class should know the exact same things, and we know intuitively that such a thing is impossible, yet we are told by number-crunching education schools that this is the only way to judge a teacher’s effectiveness.
A test should be only a diagnostic tool for teachers, showing areas of strength and weakness. It has no value as a grade of the teacher’s work.
I was a volunteer in a classroom of fourth-graders last year and the class had low test scores because of one recalcitrant student who took much of the teacher’s time and attention, brought her to tears and made the year difficult. This isn’t number crunching, it’s individuals, it’s personal, and it’s hard work, but she did it and this year is better.
How long does it take for most college students to know whether their teacher is any good? A few said it would take to the end of the semester, but the average answer ranged from 5 minutes to two class meetings. Elementary school parents and students in the first grade have opinions about their teachers’ effectiveness based on their individual differences. Quicker, easier and cheaper than crunching numbers. A first-grader is a customer, and an individual with an opinion about the teacher.
Want to know how good a teacher is? Just ask any student.
David Steiner (davidesteiner@gmail.com) is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, a retired professor of theater and public speaking and a columnist for the Allenspark WIND. He was a member of the 2009 Colorado Voices panel. Colorado Voices is an annual competition among writers vying for the opportunity to publish columns of regional interest in The Denver Post.
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