Valerie Riemer

German teacher Michael Kloster teaches his first hour German I class a lesson on verb conjugation.

One of the most influential factors in our high school experience is the teachers that we have throughout it. Teachers we don’t like can turn our love for a subject into hatred, and teachers who understand our learning styles best can get us to learn things we would have never thought possible. All of this is information that needs to be shared with our teachers so that they can better adapt to their students and we can simply start a conversation to better understand why they do what they do.

I acknowledge that many teachers already give their students an evaluation at the end of the class, and I am glad that they do it, they should absolutely continue. However, many teachers do not, they offer no structured method of giving feedback on the course or the way it was taught, and that is the issue at hand. All teachers need to begin giving evaluations so that they can have an adequate amount of student feedback to inform themselves on how their teaching is received.

If the majority of students in a class feel confused, stressed and helpless in a particular class on a regular basis, that teacher needs to know so that they can help and adapt their lesson plans for future years so that the problem will not recur. However, if that teacher does not give an evaluation, they might never know and things might never get better, leaving students with lower grades and fewer educational takeaways. On the flip-side, if students tell all of their friends about how amazing a teacher is and how much of a positive difference they have made in a student’s progress in a specific subject, that teacher deserves to hear that praise, to know that what they are doing is working.

In addition to all teachers giving an evaluation, these evaluations needs to be standardized, so that every student can give the same type and amount of feedback to every teacher, with anonymity possible if students want it, allowing both student and teacher to say and hear things about every aspect of the course. Making one unilateral evaluation would also help students to feel like their voices are equally heard by all teachers, something that Parkway West has tried to emphasize in recent years, that we really are being heard and change actually is being made in response to what we say. 

Once we have every teacher giving course evaluations, we have a solid foundation. However, to ensure that change is made where it is necessary and so that praise can better be given where praise is due, school administration needs to be actively involved in the review of these evaluations. That way, they will be more in touch with the students, teachers and the overall atmosphere here at our school, helping them to have a better idea of how to make West best. Making sure that administration reviews these course evaluations would also help hold teachers accountable, that they do seriously look at their feedback to see what students think, and so that if need be, conversations can be had with students to better get to the root of problems. School administration is a vital part of the functioning of our school, so they must be involved in this effort to increase communication between students and faculty.

If we really are fostering a caring community where every voice is heard, standardized course evaluations for every teacher are essential. That window for dialogue must be opened so that students, teachers and administrators can get together to collaborate and find solutions to problems, see each other’s viewpoints and celebrate successes. There is no resource available to us more valuable than our teachers, so it is imperative that we do all we can to communicate with them.