It’s all a matter of trust. The best performance management resource you have is the pupils you teach. But are you brave enough to subject yourself to their scrutiny?

Traditionally, schools favour a “snapshot” technique - a senior colleague, often your line manager, observes your class and then offers you feedback later on.

Certainly, it can be very useful to have an experienced member of staff to give you a critique, but as an insight into the reality of how teachers work, or how their classrooms operate, this snapshot technique has its limits.

For one thing, your chosen lesson will have been specially prepared and pupils will often perform to order with the heightened teacher presence in the classroom. And the mood of a child, a bad weather day or absent pupils are all factors that are likely to make your lesson less than typical.

In this sense, pupils themselves can offer a much more effective resource and can provide you with genuine feedback - providing you have the courage to use them in this way.

Much more dynamic than a posed snapshot, pupils’ feedback offers you a moving film of their life with you in the classroom over an extended period of time. Of course, you are advised not to try this in your first week of teaching practice.

But towards the end of your time in school, if you feel you have come to know a group of pupils well and you feel confident with them, this could be an exciting and very useful exercise, and it could lead to all kinds of new and unexpected insights which you might then use to feed into and thus improve your professional practice.

When the citizenship curriculum is launched in schools next year, increased pupil power and responsibility will be set firmly on the agenda. This is likely to be expressed through more meaningful school councils and by involving pupils in management committees and selection procedures. But recruiting pupils to help teachers to monitor their own effectiveness is an innovation that could be of benefit to everyone.

Of course, many will be nervous about the idea of pupils assessing teaching staff. Some will worry that pupils might jump at the chance to ridicule teachers or take advantage; others may be concerned that once pupils acquire an inflated sense of their own importance, then anarchy is likely to ensue.

But as long as you organise a structured feedback session that your pupils understand and you can control, you should be okay.

Most pupils are likely to feel quite honoured at having their opinions sought. And by formulating their opinions and feeding them back to you, many pupils will come to understand the idea of teaching as a real job. They will see teachers as workers aspiring to be better at what they do - and surely that is what all teachers want.

The first rule is the most important: pupils must provide their names. Allowing anonymity would only encourage reckless and hurtful comments from those who might be so inclined. This issue also offers an ideal opportunity to explain to pupils that while there are often good reasons for withholding our names when expressing our views - in elections, for example - there are also occasions when we must be prepared to stand by our personal opinions.

In any case, getting pupils to give their names is central to your feedback because you want to learn not only about your own classroom performance, but also how you have related to your pupils as individuals. Some pupils may have felt ignored in the classroom, and this gives them a chance to say so. Others may use your evaluation to express their gratitude for a job well done.

Talk through the evaluation before you start - it will be time well spent. Explain the essentials, but don’t go on at length (five minutes at most). It may be important to you, but it’s of no interest to your class.

Point out to your pupils how the five-point coding on the form enables pupils to express shades of opinion rather than a less informative “Yes” and “No”.

Section A of the evaluation looks at the seven main areas of teacher performance that most directly affect pupils.

Of course, a few pupils may respond irresponsibly in matters such as homework because they perceive setting little as a virtue. But you should trust that the majority of your pupils are sensible enough to realise that homework is important and that working independently is a vital aspect of learning.

From this first section, you will be able to draw up an honest profile about your strengths and weaknesses.

Section C requires that pupils articulate their feelings about these strengths and weaknesses. Having to expand on their perceptions will make this section very worthwhile and you may well come across some excellent quotations that sum up your qualities as a teacher.

But you should also be prepared for a few shocks when you read pupils’ answers in Section B. Some will express disappointment at the amount of personal contact they have received, even though you felt confident that you’d been fair. On the other hand, those you felt guilty about neglecting may actually feel perfectly happy with the status quo.

In the end, you should analyse your pupils’ comments, but do not take them to heart. Remember that it is only the job you do that you are trying to improve - not your whole way of life.

Alan Combes taught for 35 years and now works as an education consultant