A teacher’s success is determined solely by the effect he/she has on his/her students. Our job is to teach students, and to measure our effectiveness, we need to measure our students’ learning. While it is true that we will not be able to teach every student the same (due to individual differences and circumstances), we can have some idea of how successful we are by looking at the success of our students as a whole and on an individual basis.
The people who should judge us are our students, their parents, and ourselves. The main goal of an educator is to help change the lives of students, therefore the students should judge our success. If our students do not feel like they are learning anything from us or in our classes, then I can not see how anyone could consider us successful. Secondly, our students’ parents need to judge our success. They are the people who see the students the most, and they should have the most knowledge about whether or not their children are learning enough. Lastly, we need to judge ourselves. Self-reflection is a crucial skill that all teachers need to practice. We need to be able to look within ourselves and at our performance to determine where we can improve and what we need to change about ourselves.