Teacher Report Card – Ms. Taormina

by | Mar 12, 2021 | Classroom Culture, Risk, Teacher Improvement, Vulnerability | 0 comments

The following is a guest post from Brittany Taormina, who gave the Teacher Report Card to her students during 2021 distance learning. She tweeted me about it, and her grand risk deserves some celebration. Check it out below!

8:10am the morning bell rings, students slowly begin making their way down the 4th grade hallway into our classroom. The routine each and every morning is the same, day after day. Students read the board and follow the instructions to get their morning going.

Until…

They walked into the room on the day they got to, “grade the teacher,” the whispers, the murmurs were happening all around the room.
“We get to grade the teacher for once! Wait, what?! We get to give the teacher grades?! YES!” They were beyond excited and got right to work.

I was shocked at how serious these fourth graders took filling out this google form. In all honesty, I wasn’t expecting them to take it very seriously, but they surprised me! The information that I was able to gather was amazing.

I learned spots in which I need to continue to grow as a teacher, I learned that my kids don’t think I have bad breath (phew!), and I learned spots in which my kids think I am doing very well.

One huge takeaway I had was from the written responses the students filled out. So many of them wrote about our special little activities we do that have nothing to do with the curriculum but so much to do with our classroom community.

Which leads me to a whole another tangent.

Classroom community is one of my biggest focuses, year after year. I want each and every student in my room to feel welcome. I received responses like, “My teacher makes me feel like I belong”, “My teacher makes me feel like a million bucks!”, and “My teacher makes me feel good and ready to learn and excited to go to school and I never experienced that before”. These are all statements written by 4th graders; who knew they had such big feelings and such awareness of how an adult can make them feel?

This was eye opening to me. Needless to say, my kiddos feel loved and that made my heart happy.

Now for the growth… we all have to continue to grow. No one is ever the “perfect” teacher. I learned that sometimes my kids feel like I don’t use clear language to explain a lesson (awesome information). I need to work on explaining things in a way that all of my learners can understand.

Had I not taken this risk and given this teacher report card a shot, I would have never learned this about myself.

The teacher report card was definitely a scary thing to post in my google classroom for my kids to fill out, it was completely out of my comfort zone and something I wasn’t sure if I was ready to see the results of.

Why? I’m not sure.

I know I do my job and I love each and everyone of my kids, but you just never know how honest and harsh a kid’s criticism might be. But I took a risk, I was brave, and the kids continued to talk about that teacher report card all day long because they felt like they had a say and a true voice in our classroom.

This was a first for me this year… but definitely not a last! Thank you Mr. Vaudrey for inspiring me to be brave, take a risk, and continue to grow myself as an educator for the better of my students.

~Brittany

Picture of Brittany, smiling and giving a thumbs-up
Follow @btaorminad10 on Twitter

If you’re interested in giving the Teacher Report Card to your class, see the tweet below!

(Admin and Instructional Coaches, there are links for y’all there, too.)

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