“Belonging is the feeling you get when you can be your true self, when it is clear that your ideas matter, your opinions and thoughts are valued, your background is honored, and all that you bring to the space is respected.”

            Gloria McDaniel-Hall and Nina Weisling in “Safe, Seen, and Ready to Learn” in

            Kappan, April 2024 (Vol. 105, #7, pp. 20-25); the authors can be reached at 

            gmcdanielhall@nl.edu and nweisling@carthage.edu. 

“I could focus on equations and readings, like the scholar I wanted to be, rather than the desperate teenager that I was.”

            Emi Nietfeld on studying Barron’s Guide for standardized tests (see item #1)

“If we can dig teachers out of the avalanche of administrative tasks and other duties outside of the classroom, and free up time to actually teach, then people will be much more likely to enter the profession and stay in it for longer.” 

            Leon Furze (see item #3)

“The current four-year gap in reading achievement between high-school seniors from affluent backgrounds and those from impoverished backgrounds occurs because of the slow but steady process of losing a small amount of reading achievement year after year.”

            Richard Allington on summer learning loss (see item #4)

“We always smile when we’re visiting classrooms and hear teachers start a sentence with the phrase, ‘Remember when we learned…’”

            Lynne Munson and Nell McAnelly (see item #5)

“My greatest fear as a teacher is a student raising their hand in class and genuinely asking, ‘Why do we need to know this?’ – and me stumbling to land on a clear, important answer.” 

            Jonathan Lancaster in “To Make Assignments More Meaningful, I’m giving Students

a More-Authentic Audience” in EdSurge, March 15, 2024

“For students to say something interesting, meaningful, and authentic, they need something interesting, meaningful, and authentic to talk about.” 

            Jonathan Lancaster (ibid.)

“Traditional teacher evaluations pack an unfortunate one-two punch: they use up a lot of valuable time, and they rarely have any impact on teaching and learning.”

            Kim Marshall (see item #2)

In this New York Times article, Emi Nietfeld says she had a messy adolescence – her parents had mental health issues and at 14 she wound up in a locked facility after being in four different high-school programs and had been prescribed a wide variety of psychiatric drugs. The facility’s curriculum was worksheets, reading aloud, and preparing for the GED, and her dream of going to college was fading fast.

            But one afternoon, a staff member gave Nietfeld a copy of Barron’s Guide to the ACT and as she looked through it, she “felt a thunderclap of possibility… I could teach myself the years of math I’d missed while switching schools and improve my life in this one specific way.” The guide was her constant companion as she enrolled in a public high school, had a not-very-good experience with foster care, and then slept on friends’ sofas and the back seat of her rusty Corolla.

            Working on the practice problems led to a “meditative trance,” says Nietfeld. “For those moments, everything was still, the terror of my daily life softened by the fantasy that my efforts might land me in a dorm room of my own, with endless hot water and an extra-long twin bed. Standardized tests allowed me to look forward, even as every other part of college applications focused on the past.” 

            She filled out applications “shilling my trauma,” she says, while continuing to prepare for the tests. “I could focus on equations and readings, like the scholar I wanted to be, rather than the desperate teenager that I was.” She took the PSAT in her junior year (2009-10) and did so well that she heard from a number of top universities urging her to apply. She took the SAT, did pretty well, and ignoring her guidance counselor’s advice aimed high and got into Harvard. “It felt like a miracle,” she said, “splitting my life into a before and after.” 

            In Cambridge, she found that her exam prep paid off – she knew geometry and grammar – and that gave her the confidence to tackle areas where she wasn’t as strong, majoring in computer science even though she’d never written a line of code. She used her SAT study strategies to prepare for technical interviews and landed a stable, lucrative job at Google, then moved on to Facebook. 

            All this has made Nietfeld an advocate for restoring SAT and ACT scores as a mandatory part of the college application process. Without test scores to balance her erratic high-school record, she would never have been able to capture the attention of admissions officers at elite colleges. “I was lucky that the test offered me hope all along,” she says, “that I could cling to the promise that one day I could bubble in a test form and find myself transported into a better life – the one I lead today.” 

“Taking the SAT Changed My Life” by Emi Nietfeld in The New York Times, March 28, 2024; her 2022 memoir is Acceptance. 

 “Traditional teacher evaluations pack an unfortunate one-two punch,” says Kim Marshall in this Kappan article: “they use up a lot of valuable time, and they rarely have any impact on teaching and learning.” Assuming four hours for a single evaluation (pre-observation, classroom visit, write-up, and post-conference) and an average caseload of 25 teachers, that’s 100 hours a year – 17 full school days on a process that never shows up in the research on improving classroom instruction. 

            A few years into Marshall’s tenure as a Boston principal, he was prodded by teachers to try a different approach – short, frequent, unannounced classroom visits, each followed by a face-to-face conversation – and used it successfully for almost a decade. Looking back with 20-20 hindsight, Marshall now sees a number of ways that the bare-bones mini-observation process he used could have had even more impact:

            • A manageable caseload – With 42 teachers to supervise, Marshall ran himself ragged trying to do three mini-observations and follow-up chats a day. He berates himself for not delegating half of the faculty to his very capable assistant principal, which would have allowed each to average two classroom visits a day (each around 10 minutes) and engage in somewhat longer post-observation chats. Marshall continues to believe that mini-observing teachers once a month is enough to provide a good sampling of the 900 lessons they teach a year.

            • Buffering e-mail – Since leaving the principalship, he has seen principals increasingly use an out-of-office message during the day – for example, When students are in the building, I’m in classrooms, teacher meetings, and the cafeteria. I’ll respond to e-mails starting at 3:30 this afternoon. If this is urgent, please call ---------. Time-traveling back, he would definitely use this time-management trick to spend more time out and about.

            • Pre-visit prep – Marshall regrets that too often, he began a mini-observation without thinking about the teacher’s professional goals for the year, what they’d talked about after the previous mini-observation, the curriculum being covered, and important items in the teacher’s professional or personal life. “This quick orientation,” he says, “would have made me a more-focused and thoughtful observer.” 

            • Look-fors – In addition, he walked into classrooms without a clear sense of what to look for. Coaching his younger self, he suggests three observation questions:

-   Is the lesson objective appropriate for this grade level?

-   Is what I’m seeing the best way to teach it?

-   Are all students learning?

This easy-to-remember mental checklist would have made him more focused as he looked over students’ shoulders, quietly asked a few what they were learning, and talked with the teacher afterward.

            • Students taking a test – Entering a classroom in exam mode, Marshall always signaled the teacher that he would come back another time. He now sees this as a missed opportunity to get a copy of the test and sit down and take it himself to get insights into curriculum and assessment. A different approach: offer to proctor the class for the rest of the period and give the teacher an opportunity to observe a colleague’s class.

            • Debrief location – “For follow-up conversations,” says Marshall, “I usually caught teachers in the copying room, corridor, playground, parking lot, or my office.” He now realizes that the best place to debrief is the teacher’s classroom when students aren’t there. This neutralizes the power dynamic, makes it easier to look at student work and classroom displays, helps in remembering classroom dynamics, and makes for shorter and less-formal conversations.

            • Structuring feedback chats – After trying out and observing a variety of approaches to discussing a mini-observation with a teacher, Marshall now recommends the following:

-   Start by briefly describing something that went well during the mini-observation.

-   Use a good prompt to get the teacher talking about the lesson (some examples: I’m curious about what happened after I left. Tell me something you hoped I would notice. When was the most learning taking place? Did you get your intended learning results?)

-   Decide on one “leverage point” (if there is one) and talk with the teacher about it.

-   Agree on an actionable next step and offer support.

This variation on the infamous “feedback sandwich” draws teachers out on what they were trying to accomplish, gives them an opportunity to talk about what the supervisor didn’t see (or might have misunderstood), and allows the supervisor to change their mind about what might have been the initial coaching point.

            • Deft closure – An effective question at the end of these debriefs is asking the teacher, “What’s your big takeaway?” This gets the teacher to summarize and provides valuable feedback to the supervisor on whether the conversation was successful.

            • Stepping up to the plate – “One of my biggest regrets as principal was not being more courageous addressing mediocre teaching practices,” says Marshall – for example, only calling on students who raise their hands, low-level worksheets, a teacher grading papers during class. Mini-observations are an ideal forum to help teachers improve outside the scope of a high-stakes evaluation.

            • Short summaries – As principal, Marshall relied on the face-to-face debriefs and didn’t give teachers anything in writing afterward. Since then, he’s been persuaded that a brief written summary is important to put the feedback on the record and legitimize mini-observations as a viable alternative to the traditional system. The key is keeping the summaries short, and he favors the idea of limiting the supervisor’s narrative to 1,000 characters (about 160 words), as the T-EVAL platform (www.edusoftllc.com) pioneered.

            • Rubric scoring – As a Boston principal, Marshall had to fill out a traditional summary for each teacher. He now favors using a comprehensive rubric with teachers self-assessing at the beginning of each year and setting goals, a mid-year check-in with their supervisor, and then a summative evaluation based on the mini-observations, debriefs, other points of contact, and the teacher’s final self-assessment.

            • Unit planning – Another area where Marshall believes his work as a principal could have improved was looking at teachers’ unit planning. Time-traveling back, he would provide training in backwards curriculum design and ask teacher teams to think through key elements, including big ideas, essential questions, knowledge and skill goals, likely student misconceptions, and assessments. Knowing these, he would have been a more perceptive mini-observer, and debriefs with teachers would have gone beyond the micro of that lesson to the teacher’s macro learning goals.

            • Results-focused teacher teams – Marshall says one of his big wins in his final year as principal was implementing a schedule that gave each teacher team an uninterrupted 90-minute meeting once a week. But teachers only occasionally used this time to look together at common assessments and student work. Encouraging and supporting work-analysis meetings, and occasionally dropping in, would have given him valuable insights about what teachers were working on and made him a better mini-observer and coach. The best question to listen for: Your students did better than mine; what did you do?

            Drawing on his work with supervisors and teachers since leaving the principalship, Marshall lists some ways of implementing mini-observations that he believes are problematic:

-   Checklists – Trying to check boxes detracts from being a thoughtful observer.

-   Rubric-scoring a lesson – Rubrics are summative descriptions of a teacher’s overall performance and are the wrong grain size for evaluating a lesson.

-   Shooting from the hip – Giving teachers immediate written feedback shortcuts the tremendous potential of face-to-face conversations to build trust and improve teaching.

-   Real-time coaching – Supervisors correcting teachers as they teach runs the risk of undermining teachers with their students and is intensely annoying to many teachers.

-   Inequity – Some teachers getting more mini-observations than others raises all kinds of questions; Marshall believes all teachers should have the same number.

-   Inspecting lesson plans and artifacts – Spot-checking instruction in frequent mini-observations should make this kind of micromanagement unnecessary. 

-   A compliance mentality – “If supervisors feel pressured by their boss to meet a quota,” says Marshall, “the process can become oppressive.” But if the superintendent shows genuine interest in what principals are seeing in classrooms and does frequent co-observations, numerical goals should fade in importance.

-   VAM and SLOs – Researchers have shown that value-added measures and high-stakes student learning objectives are an inaccurate and morale-busting approach to teacher evaluation. Besides, the 2015 ESSA legislation removed the federal mandate to include student achievement as a significant part of teachers’ evaluations.

But “student learning should be central to educators’ conversations,” says Marshall – and it can be in every mini-observation debrief, every visit to a teacher team meeting, every cafeteria chat with students. His mantra: shift the conversation to results with medium stakes and maximum impact.

            A pushback on mini-observations is that they’re too difficult for ordinary mortals – getting into classrooms, seeing enough in ten minutes, making time for the debriefs, conducting them skillfully, keeping up the pace through the year. “I disagree!” says Marshall. “The design features of the mini-observation system make it manageable for almost all school leaders – and put administrators and teachers on a positive learning curve.” Here’s how:

-   Supervisors have multiple at-bats to improve their observation and debrief skills.

-   In debriefs, teachers can widen supervisors’ window and correct misunderstandings.

-   The four-part debrief structure allows teachers to play a meaningful part.

-   Making one coaching point at a time makes the supervisor’s job less daunting. 

-   Frequent visits allow supervisors to address mediocre and ineffective practices.

-   Teachers have multiple opportunities to show their best stuff.

-   Frequent visits build trust and encourage non-defensive reflection about teaching.

-   Suggestions at the micro level are easier for teachers to accept. 

-   Summative rubric ratings flow naturally from frequent, substantive interactions. 

“In short,” says Marshall, “mini-observations bring out the best in administrators, are something they can learn to do well, and stand the best chance of bringing about steady improvements in teaching and learning.” 

“Mini-Observations 2.0” by Kim Marshall in Kappan, April 2024 (Vol. 105, #7, pp. 52-57); Marshall can be reached at kim.marshall48@gmail.com. 

 In this online article, author/consultant Leon Furze says K-12 educators are just beginning to figure out how to use tools like ChatGPT to solve their perennial workload problems, especially outside-the-classroom tasks. Managing time is even more urgent because of post-pandemic burnout, teachers leaving the profession, and dwindling numbers in the teacher preparation pipeline. 

A recent synthesis of research found that the average teacher is working over 50 hours a week, with work spilling over to personal time, and “non-core” administrative tasks taking an increasing proportion. “If we can dig teachers out of the avalanche of administrative tasks and other duties outside of the classroom,” says Furze, “and free up time to actually teach, then people will be much more likely to enter the profession and stay in it for longer.” Principals report working 50-60 hours a week, with “non-educative” work taking away from instructional leadership and technology making the job 24/7. 

It’s been suggested that giving teachers pre-prepared lesson plans, unit plans, and classroom resources would help the time problem – especially for new teachers and those teaching outside their area of certification. But this idea has been met with strong resistance, says Furze. Most teachers don’t want cookie-cutter lesson plans. “They want the time, space, and collaboration to create rich and meaningful resources that lean into their areas of expertise and interest.” 

So how can generative AI be helpful to teachers? Working with a group of Australian educators in March of 2024, Furze used the Eisenhower urgent/important matrix (popularized by Stephen Covey) to look at teachers’ work in four quadrants:

• Quadrant 1: Urgent and important – High value activities that need to happen right away – for example, behavior incidents, a physical injury or mental health crisis, important scheduled meetings with parents, today’s lessons, assessment and reporting deadlines.

• Quadrant 2: Important and not urgent – High value activities that don’t have pressing urgency – for example, personal physical and mental health, longer-term subject and unit planning, faculty-level strategic planning, professional learning, relationship-building with colleagues.

• Quadrant 3: Urgent and not important – Responding reactively to situations that crop up, dealing with other people’s problems that have been put on the educator’s lap – for example, some phone calls and most e-mails, drop-in visits from students, most administrative and compliance deadlines, technology glitches, unproductive meetings.

            • Quadrant 4: Not urgent and not important – Time fillers and time wasters that don’t add anything meaningful to the teacher’s role or the people they work with – for example, social media use, unhelpful conversations, compulsive checking of e-mail, over-planning lessons, laminating everything, and “procrasticleaning.”

            Although it’s sometimes necessary to clear one’s mind with a Quadrant 4 activity like scrolling through social media or venting to a colleague, the general message from the Eisenhower matrix is to minimize time putting out fires, delegate or automate less-important activities, and maximize the time spent in Quadrant 2 on meaningful, long-term work that adds value for students and colleagues. 

“Generative AI can potentially help at all of these levels,” says Furze. Here are his suggestions for each quadrant:

• Quadrant 1 – In the middle of a lesson, a student asks a question to which the teacher doesn’t know the answer. Ask ChatGPT! Alternatively, what if students raise a tangential question that’s of great interest to them but a red herring to the teacher? The teacher might call on AI to provide information and then get the lesson back on track. This approach “shows the students you care about what they’re interested in,” says Furze, “but also that you’re only willing to discuss that within the bounds of the lesson.” 

Another urgent-and-important application is what he calls “hand on the door handle planning” – a moment when you’re about to enter a classroom and realize you don’t have a lesson planned. It’s possible in just a few minutes – after inputting the right prompt – to get a detailed lesson plan in time! (See the full article for a prompt for a lesson on biofuels.)

• Quadrant 3 – An e-mail from a parent lands in your inbox that’s urgent and important to them, but your school policy says you have 24 hours to respond. “Generative artificial intelligence can be used to understand e-mails,” says Furze, “particularly ones that are longer, complex, or fraught with emotions, and then produce draft responses to those e-mails that don’t require a great deal of mental energy.” In a pinch, this can help craft a response that promptly addresses the parent’s concerns without taking you off track. Generative AI can also automate boring stuff like reformatting documents and sprucing up notes.

Responding to other external deadlines, other people’s questions, and requests for information are part of daily life. Generative AI can help by understanding what’s being asked and producing a draft of content. It can also, says Furze, “speak to whoever is in charge of issuing these things and ask them to please stop.” 

• Quadrant 4 – This is not a good place to spend time, he says, and on top of wasting a lot of time, you’ll feel unproductive at the end of the day. AI might be able to help by coming up with a response to this prompt: I’m finding myself wasting way too much time on social media at work. Suggest three evidence-based strategies for getting me back on track and being more proactive.

• Quadrant 2 – This is where AI has the greatest potential, says Furze: “Quadrant 2 activities center on projects that require us to create space, dedicate time, and create opportunities to step back from the urgent demands of the job and deliberately focus on our roles and our future goals.” Here are some suggestions:

-   Strategic planning – AI can “help you set goals, plan units of work, or build bigger-picture faculty and school strategic plans,” says Furze.

-   Making suggestions for addressing students’ likely misconceptions. 

-   Coming up with ideas for long-term career steps.

-   Professional learning networks – AI can help identify key people, resources, and communities to connect with based on your specific interests and goals. 

-   Data analysis and informed decision making – AI tools can help teachers and administrators make sense of student assessment data, identifying patterns and trends and informing classroom instructional decisions and schoolwide initiatives.

“These can all contribute,” says Furze, “to more proactive Quadrant 2 approaches to planning units of work or building relationships with students.” 

“Artificial Intelligence and Teacher Workload: Can AI Actually Save Educators Time?” by Leon Furze, March 21, 2024

 In this article in Kappan, Richard Allington (University of Tennessee/Knoxville) says that while the reading achievement gap between black and white students has narrowed over the last 50 years, the reading proficiency gap between students in higher- and lower-income families has doubled. Major factors are students’ access to a variety of books during the school year (with many having less well-stocked school libraries and restrictions on taking books home) and summer learning loss. Children from low-income families lose 2-3 months of reading achievement every summer, while more-fortunate children typically gain a month, which accumulates to a four-year gap by the end of high school. 

            What is behind the summer melt? A major factor is that when schools are closed, less-fortunate students have less access to the books they want to read from school libraries, public libraries, and bookstores. 

Allington and his colleagues conducted two studies in high-poverty elementary schools – an urban district in Florida and a rural district in Tennessee. Some primary-grade children chose 10 books at a book fair free of charge to take home for the summer (a control group did not receive free books). After three consecutive years of the experiment, researchers found that the students who got self-selected books read almost a full year better than those in the control group, closing the wealth achievement gap. 

The three-year cost of the program was $200 per child – considerably less than summer school but equal or better in impact. “The effects were greatest among the students whose families had the lowest incomes,” says Allington. 

How can simply having books over the summer make such a big difference for beginning readers? Allington points to the work of David Share (2004), who has found that most children figure out much of what they know about the relationships among letters, sounds, and words as they turn the pages of books. This self-teaching hypothesis is not widely known, says Allington, but it “suggests how reading volume relates to reading achievement.” 

“The current four-year gap in reading achievement between high-school seniors from affluent backgrounds and those from impoverished backgrounds,” says Allington, “occurs because of the slow but steady process of losing a small amount of reading achievement year after year. Our work suggests that if every school district gave children from low-income families the opportunity to take home self-selected books to read over the summer months, American schools would likely produce comparable levels of reading achievement for all children, regardless of family income. They would be leveling the playing field for students who need a boost the most.” 

“Free Books to Close the Reading Achievement Gap” by Richard Allington in Kappan, April 2024 (Vol. 105, #7, pp. 48-51); Allington can be reached at richardlallington@gmail.com.

“The nation is in a math crisis, worsened by the pandemic,” say Lynne Munson and Nell McAnelly (Great Minds) in this Kappan article. “Our kids can’t afford to lose any more ground in math.” On the 2022 NAEP assessment, only a third of 4th graders and a quarter of 8th graders scored proficient and above. To do better, say Munson and McAnelly, it’s essential that all students get math instruction that has these three components:

• Coherence across the grades – “We always smile when we’re visiting classrooms and hear teachers start a sentence with the phrase, ‘Remember when we learned…,’” say the authors – for example, connecting addition and multiplication in elementary school and ratio and rate to whole number multiplication in middle school, and using consistent strategies and models over time. “It’s not enough for teachers to be experts in the grade level they teach,” they continue. “They need a solid understanding of the math content that precedes and follows their grade… and collaborate with colleagues within and across grades.” 

• Deep conceptual understanding – “Kids need to understand the reason math works and why a math idea is important,” say Munson and McAnelly. They also need to be fluent with math facts and procedures so they can do them quickly and efficiently, “which frees up working memory to engage in more complex thinking and problem solving.”

• Application in school and beyond – Discussing and engaging in real-world uses of math – calculating batting averages, measuring distances, making scale drawings, counting change – gives meaning and context to classroom math.

“It’s Time to Come Together Around Good Math Instruction” by Lynne Munson and Nell McAnelly in Kappan, April 2024 (Vol. 105, #7, pp. 64-65)

In this School Library Journal article, Sandra Nickel says studies estimate that 80 percent of autism cases in girls under 18 are undiagnosed. Her daughter didn’t find out until her sophomore year in college, Nickel herself only last year. As a result of this diagnostic blind spot, she says, “many girls with autism grow up not understanding why they feel different or why life is so difficult for them. They feel alone and unaccepted and have been called the ‘lost girls’ by commentators and researchers alike.” 

            Children’s picture books that explicitly address autism can be helpful for kids with the condition and adults around them, describing challenges and accommodations. But these kids, especially those not yet diagnosed, need something more, says Nickel. “They may be searching for a story where the main character is appreciated for who she is and not required to change.” She suggests 12 books that fill the bill (click here for cover images and short summaries):

-   Stellaluna by Janell Cannon, grade 1-3

-   Hot Dog by Doug Salati, PreS-3

-   Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty, illustrated by David Roberts, K-3

-   How to Party Like a Snail by Naseem Hrab, illustrated by Kelley Collier, K-3

-   The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf, illustrated by Robert Lawson, PreS-3

-   A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni, PreS-3

-   Frog and Toad Together by Arnold Lobel, PreS-2

-   Ways to Play by Lyn Miller-Lachmann, illustrated by Gabriel Alboronzo, PreS-2

-   Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne, illustrated by E.H. Shepard, K-4

-   A Normal Pig by K-Fai Steele, PreS-3

-   A Way with Wild Things by Larissa Theule, illustrated by Sara Palacios, PreS-1

-   Edward Almost Sleeps Over by Rosemary Wells, PreS-1

“Affirming Autism” by Sandra Nickel in School Library Journal, March 2024 (Vol. 70, #3, pp. 46-49); short summaries and cover images of the books are here.

            “Promising as these developments may seem,” says Kogan, “it is concerning that the hype surrounding student surveys has gotten well ahead of the evidence. Researchers have devoted too little attention to validating survey-based measurements to confirm that they assess the things policymakers hope to measure. Nor have decision-makers sufficiently considered the potential consequences of attaching high stakes to student survey responses.” 

Unintended consequences include teachers “teaching to the survey” – mimicking traits that students will be asked about – or trying to game the process by, for example, inflating students’ grades, assigning less-demanding work, and handing out sweets on the day of the survey. Kogan cites troubling evidence from the field of medicine, where doctors – trying to boost their high-stakes patient-satisfaction data – have been too quick to prescribe antibiotics whose overuse can contribute to antibiotic resistance in the population. 

“If there is one lesson that the past four decades of education reform have taught us,” Kogan concludes, “it’s that well-meaning policies rarely work as their proponents expect and hope. Sometimes they even backfire, producing the opposite of what was intended.” 

[Using student survey data for high stakes in teacher evaluation is definitely problematic, but students’ observations can be very helpful feedback for teachers. Students, after all, are in classrooms every day, compared to infrequent visits by school administrators. Ron Ferguson (Harvard University and the Tripod Project) has solid research indicating that students are generally perceptive and honest in their assessment of teachers. Using high-quality survey questions (like those from Tripod and Panorama) twice a year (perhaps November and June), getting the results to teachers quickly (within 48 hours), and having teachers look at students’ comments with a supervisor or trusted colleague – this combination can be powerful professional development for teachers. It’s helpful for the administrator or colleague to ask three questions as they scan the survey results with the teacher:

-   What are some positive comments students made about your teaching?

-   Are there any questions where students may have misunderstood or been unfair?

-   What are a couple of improvements you could make in your teaching based on students’ comments?                                                                                            K.M.]

“Are Student Surveys the Right Tools for Evaluating Teacher Performance?” by Vladimir Kogan in Education Next, Spring 2024 (Vol. 24, #2, pp. 32-36); Kogan can be reached at kogan.18@osu.edu.