toefl 2018.6.2 independent writing

When it comes to the issue who is better candidate for evaluating teachers’ performance, people's opinion differs from person to person and culture to culture. Someone may argue that teachers are better because they always concentrate on the class when it comes to evaluate. While others hold that students are more appropriate, because they are the exact audience who constantly take the teachers lectures. As far as I am concerned, evaluation by students is more useful.

 

First, students' satisfaction is a main criterion for assessing teaching performance. It is pretty ridiculous that a perfect teacher who makes his students unsatisfied with his teaching styles. Also, even though some people may argue that students may not focus on the class as teachers when it comes to the evaluation. However, most of the students would concentrate on the lectures. So, when assessing by quantities of students, the result would be more reliable than making a conclusion by only few teachers. Also, students know better about the teachers. A teacher usually spends most of the time on doing his own researches with students or teaching students in class. However, other teachers may seldomly communicate with this specific teacher if they don't have cooperation on a project or they may simply just talk about topics having nothing to do with teaching. Additionally, as the time went by, students would finally find some problems of the teacher. While others teachers who make the evaluation may just ignore some potential shortcomings of this teacher with limited assessing time.

 

Also, assessing by students can bonus the both sides. For example, our school now have really professional teachers who can introduce theories very clearly and logically because of students’ evaluation contribution. Had teachers been assessed by other teachers, teachers would probably manage to ingratiate with each other rather than focusing on teaching. However, it is the student is who take the responsibility of evaluation on teaching performance. Thus, teachers focus more time on improving their teaching skill and spending more time on analyzing how to make the class more interesting for the students to learn. Meanwhile, because of this feedback mechanism, not only better teachers get extra rewards, but also both the teachers and students benefit from this. Teachers improve their teaching, while students have better teachers. Admittedly, other relevant teachers may know better on how the teacher performs because they have more background knowledge in this specific area. While when it comes to assess teaching performance, this knowledge may not be useful, because the satisfaction of these teachers may not necessarily mean this teacher can make the students easier and better to understand what he is trying to illustrate.

 

In conclusion, evaluation based on students’ comments is a better choice when assessing the teaching performance, because the students know more about the teacher. Furthermore, because the feedback between teachers and students, both sides would benefit a lot.