MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES ON TEACHER EVALUATION IN THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

Abstract

Defining what makes up teaching effectiveness has proved to be a complex task for researchers in language pedagogy. The present study attempts to shed light on the perceptual differences of effective teaching by providing a comparison of the evaluations of teaching effectiveness of one instructor with those of his/her students from two beginning Spanish classes and three peer evaluators. Furthermore, this study provides insight into the factors that students consider when filling out university Teacher-Course Evaluation Forms (TCE). In this study, the students completed a five-item questionnaire from the TCE forms where they evaluated their instructor’s teaching effectiveness and explained what factors they had taken into account in rating the instructor. Next, all the participants completed a 35-item questionnaire evaluating the instructor’s effectiveness. The researchers found a significant difference between all of the participants except between the observers and one of the classes. Given these results, this research supports the notion of using multiple perspectives in teacher evaluation. In addition, this study raises some concerns regarding the validity of student and self-evaluations, hence the TCE may not truthfully reflect the teacher’s effectiveness. The qualitative data showed a wide variety of reasons for students’ responses that did not always correlate to the numerical score given the instructor.