What we learned about student evaluations during the last few blog posts can be summarized down to these five points:

Nobody likes them. They can’t accurately measure how effective a teacher is. They are hard to design and analyze. They are the best tool currently available. We need a new system.

Some argue that student evaluations of teaching should be completely abolished. There’s simply no reason to listen to student voices as they don’t know how to teach or how knowledgeable a teacher is in a subject.

But let’s think about that. Can this really be true?

If we are to trust students to become the leaders of tomorrow and to invent smart solutions to problems created by previous generations, we MUST be able to trust them to, at the very least, provide meaningful feedback to teachers. Just because some students leave bad feedback, we shouldn’t remove the possibility for everyone.

There’s just no getting away from the fact that students experience the teacher’s expertise first hand, and are thus a prime source of information that can be used to develop better teachers.

I’m not saying it’s the only source of information, I’m saying it’s a vital source.