Job Discussion Forums

[T.C.53]

Most Honorable List Members:

How can 1st and 2nd year University Students, 20 and 21 years old, pass an evaluation on a teacher holding a Bachelors or Masters Degree with considerably more life, work, and academic experiance?

What is all this Blow ha ha all about? Our jobs are in the hands of kids?

I must be missing something. Any help greatly appreciated.

Best regards and Wishes
Top Cat.

[Spiderman Too]

Does one need to be a qualified chef to evaluate whether a restaurant meal tastes good?

Do students need any qualifications to evaluate whether a particular teacher's lessons are; helping them to learn the taught subject, structured, well-prepared, interesting and generally helpful?

Of course, students evaluating your command & knowledge of English would be inappropriate.

[The Voice Of Reason]

...

[tofuman]

I'm evaluated by students 17-19 years old.

[ivytony]

The evaluation of teachers by students is also very common in the universities in the US. Ain't they (undergraduate) 18--22? You never done that before when in college?

[Voldermort]

I can completely understand university students evaluating a foreign teacher. Infact I would encourage them to do this and ask for the feedback. Students of this age know exactly what they want to gain from your class and know how they like to be taught.

However are strongly dissagree with any younger students performing any form of evaluation. I teach in a Senior High School and my students are often encouraged to do such a thing. With students this age they have no interest in what you are teaching them, they simply want to have fun, sleep, play games and watch the clown.

Worse than this, I have had a teacher walk into one of my classes in a primary school (grade 3), hand out evaluation forms then walk back out again without so much as a 'hello'. Can this really be justified?

More and more contracts are now stating that an evaluation of your classes will be performed on a monthly basis. So far I have only seen one contract that actually states the FAO will conduct the evaluation.

[Roger]

[kev7161]

[bendan]

I don't mind being evaluated by my students, but I'd prefer it if employers used various methods to assess teachers. When I teach a class of disinterested guys I'll generally get a lower evaluation than when I teach a class of motivated girls.

College administrators take all results at face value in my experience, so a low score means you're a poor teacher and a high score means you're a good one. I benefitted from this lack of analytical ability as much as I've suffered from it, but it still irritates me. Another irritation is that the administrators at my college can't understand why I might want more details of the evaluation other than a final score, so that I could know in which areas the students thought I was strong or weak.

[shenyanggerry]

One of my profs during my TESL course told us that they actually use student feedback when deciding things like granting tenure.

[ironclay]

[Babala]

When I used to teach at a college, all of the foreign teachers were evaluated by students (and only the FT'S, not the CT). We were given the results. They only printed the bad comments, none of the positive ones, however they did show the overall results (how many excellent, good, average, below average you were given). The only bad comment I received from a student was that he felt class time would be better spent watching DVD's instead of the english I insisted on teaching them. I asked the director if he really felt this was a valid complaint and if so I could fix it by spending the rest of the year, playing DVD's

[Talkdoc]

[7969]

[bendan]