PUSD Students Want to Give Feedback on Teachers’ Performance

Student leaders at Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD) want students to be able to give feedback on the performance of their teachers to improve the quality of teaching in the District.

Student Board member Emilio Alban from Blair High School brought the concern of the student assembly, composed of 24 peer-elected students from six PUSD high schools, at the PUSD Board meeting June 13.

“The student assembly has decided that we want to focus on improving the communication between the student and the teacher in the classroom setting,” Alban said. “We believe that student feedback to teachers has the potential to drastically improve the quality of teaching and learning for all in our District.”

Alban said the student assembly is not yet advocating for any specific tool to achieve their goal of ensuring quality education in the District. He also noted the importance of research and getting the input of the whole student body, teachers unions and District administration in creating a plan in the future.

While he floated the possibility of using Google forms where students can give anonymous feedback about their teachers’ teaching style, Alban also said student leaders recognized that sending feedback anonymously could be problematic.

“If you give kids the ability to tell their teachers whatever they want in an anonymous form, some kids will take the opportunity to say rude, unproductive, and demoralizing things to their teachers, which of course is the opposite of what we’re striving for,” Alban said.

“However, we believe that there is a way to create a structure to ensure that teachers can really benefit from student feedback in a way that helps both the teachers and the student.”

PUSD Interim Academic Officer Helen Hill said the District is not requiring the use of Rate My Teachers, an educational site where students evaluate, rate, and review teachers and courses, but teachers may decide to use the site or whatever platform they like to get student feedback.

“I think the power in his (Alban’s) statement that I’m excited about is that this is an intent to launch some research and consideration around how we can best gather feedback that’ll be in a collaborative way with our teachers union, our administration, our departments, et cetera but with the intent hopefully that this body also agrees with that students providing feedback to and from teachers is valuable,” Hill said.

Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco urged the Board to strongly consider allowing student feedback that is not anonymous.

“I would also have the students strongly consider feedback that’s not anonymous as well. I think sometimes it’s helpful to know which students you might not be reaching as opposed to just having ambiguous feedback,” Blanco said.

“One time, I was doing some anonymous looking at psych reports with a team of people and to see why we were over-identifying certain populations. And a consultant suggested to me not to take off the names because understanding the names and who the students are was a very important part of being able to make the changes. So maybe there could be a balance between the two or think of some identifiers that would help the teachers know biases or differences that they might not be aware of,” she added.

It can be recalled that last March, six Student Council members who have been elected by the high school student body in their respective PUSD schools were sworn in to represent the students’ voice on the Board.

They will rotate in attendance at PUSD Board meetings and will cast preferential votes on behalf of PUSD high school student bodies.

The student Board members have brought before the Board concerns of the student body since last June.

Last month, they demanded Board action over dirty restrooms in the District.