Teacher feedback - using our heads or our feet?

I reconnected this past weekend with some of my former classmates from INSEAD at Pomelo in San Francisco. After chatting with them about shared friends and experiences, I remembered how my INSEAD experience also included the first time I had seen students voting with their feet.

I imagine a professor's worst nightmare must include showing up for a lecture prepared and finding only a handful of students willing to return to their course. I was one of three students sitting in that empty amphi while the beleaguered visiting professor bravely smiled and continued his lecture as if we were a full class of 70.

This experience exemplifies the lack of appropriate constructive feedback mechanisms in the education system. In order for graduate students to feel that their only point of recourse is to boycott the lecture hall, effective feedback processes clearly fall short. In higher education, course evaluation surveys mid-way and at the end of a course allow students to rate professors and provide constructive feedback. Such feedback is of limited use given its extended timeline and general nature. Furthermore, a clever professor could easily manipulate the system with strategic use of testing and grading. Feedback is also often collected from observations by other professors or teaching assistants. K-12 education offers even fewer feedback channels.

Although my classmates successfully achieved their objectives by boycotting the classroom, it is certainly an extreme feedback strategy that I would not wish on any teacher. Teachers can often learn as much, if not more, than students in their classroms, and higher education, as well as K-12 schools, should view effective feedback mechanisms as a very real opportunity for improving teacher quality. One promising avenue to watch is handhelds in classrooms, for example, in a Texas school district, where teachers and administrators can more easily identify strengths and weaknesses in teaching strategies, and in university lecture halls, where professors can instantly assess student comprehension and receive student questions via the Next Generation Mobile Classroom project. These innovations would not have helped my disgruntled classmates, but I remain optimistic that, in the near future, we will see more opportunities for students, parents and the community-at-large to provide direct feedback on the quality of teaching.

Comments

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