Selecting Raters for Middle and High School Students with Multiple Teachers

Overview

The question of how to select Raters for Middle and High School students with multiple teachers often arises. This is an ongoing question and ultimately, it is up to the school to choose who should complete the ratings. 

Suggestions for Selecting Raters

1. The key criterion is that the rater should be the individual who knows the student best. This will vary from school to school. If the schools have a meaningful advisory period, that teacher would be a good choice. This also applies to schools that have pods or learning communities in which one teacher remains with a small group of students throughout the high school years as an advisor/mentor/consistent presence.
2. If schools do not have a meaningful advisory or learning community structure, the second criterion would be, who sees the student engaged in a variety of behaviors that would provide opportunities to exhibit the behaviors? For example, if the teacher or department stresses “sit and git” instruction in which students are relatively passive recipients of knowledge, that would be a less good choice that an instructor or department that provides individual, small group, large group, project-oriented learning, etc.
3. A third option is to ask the student who they would like to have do the rating. Could be any school staff person (coach, counselor, front office staff) that they feel knows them best.
4. A good fallback is to have a core academic subject teacher (to ensure coverage) rate the student.

If schools wanted to go the extra step, they could have more than one staff/teacher rate, but they should not combine or average ratings.  The approach would be to understand the demonstration of the skills in different environments.