To the Editor:
“What Works in the Classroom? Ask the Students” (news article, Dec. 11) highlights one of the greatest untapped resources for school reform: students.
While the Gates Foundation survey asks students about teacher effectiveness after the fact and for evaluative purposes, students are available to teachers daily as sources of information about students’ learning.
If teachers and students talked regularly about how students learn, what works, what doesn’t and what would help them to learn better, teachers could get insight into how to teach more effectively.
Surveys are fine for foundations, but conversations about learning are what work in the everyday lives of learners and teachers.
Carol Rodgers
Albany, Dec. 11, 2010
The writer is an associate professor of education at the University at Albany-SUNY.
To the Editor:
It’s a shame that $45 million was spent to verify the statement, If a teacher is liked then he or she is usually a good teacher. All one had to do was ask a teacher working in a school. Students generally do recognize good teachers, and most teachers are well aware of that.
As we teach in mathematics classes though, the converse—if a teacher is good, then he or she is well liked—is not necessarily true. In my own schooling, I had many teachers whom I did not like at the time but later realized that they were among the best because I learned so much from their classes.
A teacher’s persistence and high expectations are sometimes annoying for students, but they stretch the mind and help the students meet their educational potential.
If we were to depend too much on good student ratings to identify good teachers, many good teachers would be missed and possibly lost to the profession.
Howard Brenner
Woodmere, N.Y., Dec. 13, 2010
The writer is a high school teacher.
Note from KBJ: My goal as an instructor is to give students what they need. It is not to give them what they want. I don't care one bit whether my students like me.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 