The problem
Growing up, I went to a state school, which meant mediocre education and unfirable teachers. I had my trouble with some teachers through the years, often because I either knew more than them or they were just inadequate at their job. I also had some incredible teachers who had such an impact on my life that I to this day have a deep interest in subjects they taught. The sentiment around these teachers went by word of mouth through students, but there was no channel for students to give this feedback directly to teachers.
I had a friend at the time who got a taste of the feedback system at our school. He ended up setting up a meeting between himself, his parents, and his teacher to give him the feedback that he needed to drastically change his behavior and teaching methods to live up to his role as a teacher. The months after this meeting, the teacher would ignore him in class, give him worse grades, and single him out. This was a clear signal to me that the current, non-anonymous, feedback system was broken.
The solution
I knew that no one in the public school system would solve this problem, so I ended up taking matters into my own hands. This is how ratemyteacher.no was born.
I set up a website, adding all regions in Norway, and added most of the big schools in the country. I then added forms to add both new schools and new teachers. These forms would then hit my backend, and after reviewing them, I would greenlight them to get added. Then for each teacher, there was a rating system with stars between 1-6 (same as our grade range as students) and a comment section. I would manually review all comments before they were published publicly.
Launching it
I had the website and now needed to promote it. I joined to 100’s of Facebook groups of different schools across the country and just started posting about Ratemyteacher everywhere.
Within just a few weeks, it started taking off across Norway, getting tens of thousands of visitors daily. At some point, I was reviewing 500+ comments daily.
This is when the trouble started. My head principal started getting pressure from the teachers union to do something about it. She started pulling me randomly out of classes, often multiple times a day, definitely partially as a power-play, and tried to get me to shut it down.
It also started garnering national media attention and was on the daily news for multiple days. I got called down by journalists and ended up getting an article from the biggest news service in Norway: NRK.
It was definitely an exciting time and sparked the debate on better teacher feedback systems. In the end, I did have to study for high school, and the project took up too much of my time. I did end up shutting it down, with a promise from the school that they would implement anonymous teacher ratings, which they did just a few months later.
In the end, it ended up getting a little over 1M views, which was pretty cool in a country with only 5M people.