?Kids know effective teaching when they experience it.? So says Harvard's Ronald Ferguson, a researcher who designed questionnaires that were given to thousands of students across the nation and which asked those students to evaluate their teachers. According to the New York Times:
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, according to a progress report on the research.
Certainly interesting, but not so surprising. Similarly unsurprising is the discovery that pupils who agreed with the statement, ?We spend a lot of time in this class practicing for the state test,? are often those who make smaller gains than their peers on just such standardized tests. The big question, of course, is whether this sort of student feedback should be included in a teacher's job-performance evaluation.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow