News: Larry Ferlazzo: How My Ninth-Grade English Classes Evaluated Me This Year

This is a really powerful entry by an amazing educator. How many of us would put our student evaluations out there publicly. I do believe it would make better teachers of us all. But, I also believe you have to ask the right questions. That is the tough part. Clearly, Larry does ask the right questions. I am thinking about how I can do this in my class this summer (July). I do love his first of the semester and end of the semester assignment that shows growth. I have to figure out that piece. Larry provides some great questions that could easily be adapted to any classroom.

At every university, including where I teach, we do end of course teacher evaluation (TEVAL). The problem is, the questions don’t really tell us much. Mine are generally fine, but there always seems to be those that just use it as a forum to gripe about things instructors have no control of. For example, like the time the class was offered. I have 5 sections and five different times and days, that gripe always floors me, PICK ANOTHER SECTION!!

OK, enough of my soapbox. Just read Larry’s story and look at the links to his past evals, it is insightful and in looking at all the entries and examples he provides, I think I will be able to come up with an evaluation that might actually help me and even get my students, all future teachers, thinking about this process in their own classrooms.

by Larry Ferlazzo, Websites of the Day

“As regular readers of this blog know, every year I have students evaluate my classes and me and post the results — warts and all — here (as well as email them to my colleagues). I think that making the results public, and letting students know in advance that this is what I’m going to do, may help them take it little more seriously than they might otherwise.

I do a different evaluation process for each class, so each year write several different posts. This one is from my double-block ninth-grade English class and from my one-period pre-International Baccalaureate ninth-grade English class.”

READ the FULL sorry, CLICK HERE