CHENNAI: The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), which regulates engineering colleges and polytechnics across India, has chalked out a detailed mechanism to assess the performance of teachers, under different categories. Chennaiites tell us if rating teachers would help the education system.
Improvement in academic outcome
Technical education constitutes a major share in the overall education system and plays a vital role in the social and economic development of a nation. The more we emphasise on specific aspects dealing with teacher appraisal and feedback, the more the change in teachers’ practices to improve their teaching. Student feedback is a valuable source of information that provides a wide range of benefits including improving academic outcome, institutional benefits, and community benefits.
Need for a pragmatic approach
Overall, this is a good move as students are the primary stakeholders in the education system. While we do have a few objective metrics such as papers published and contribution to the department that are taken into consideration along with a confidential hearing, adding student feedback to the process would increase credibility and transparency. It is important though that AICTE considers a pragmatic approach to implement student feedback.
Inclusion of more proactive roles
In many colleges, student feedback is taken very lightly when it comes to issues like portion completion, effective communication, unbiased correction and attitude of the teachers. Giving 25 marks to student feedback for the assessment criteria that could possibly decide the promotion of a teacher will definitely make teachers take a more proactive role. The assessment must incorporate the ability of the teacher to correlate subject knowledge with the current industrial practices and their proactive roles in organising well-planned industrial visits as these are the areas a graduating engineer must be well aware of and it also boosts the chances of employment for aspiring engineers in their future. Test lectures could also be conducted as a part of the assessment as professors are expected to grab the attention of students.
To meet demands
Evaluating teachers under various sections predominantly helps them to pinpoint the facets of their pedagogy that needs honing — to understand where students encounter difficulties or are in need of an explicit understanding. From a student’s point of view, evaluating teachers meets our demands and interests to acquire knowledge in various divisions of a particular subject.
Enhances teaching skills
These days, any textile showroom, restaurant or service centre you step into, gives you a customer feedback form which is taken into account in improving their system. Considering this, teaching is probably the most important job which requires the actual feedback in order to enhance the teaching ability, eventually resulting in quality education for all. Hence, teacher rating by students in all educational institutions is very crucial for teachers to be aware of their standards and most importantly to reflect upon. As a high school teacher, I have found my annual student feedback to be very helpful in making me a better teacher and hope it brings a difference in other aspiring teachers as well.