Best recommender? (School Psychology)

[kingslayer]

Hi everyone!

I have one professor and one lecturer for my letters of rec, but the third has been kind of murky.

I just started an internship working with children this August. I work in a classroom & am supervised by the lead teacher, so I work closest with her. She has a bachelor's and is currently in grad school for her master's. She was ok with writing letters of rec for me, however, a couple weeks ago she kind of grew cold feet because the recommender forms ask for judges of academic ability (which I don't use at all during the internship). I'm not getting a grade or anything. She said to ask the person above her, the Director, to fill them out instead. This would be no problem, but the director has not worked with me at all. I've already sent around 4 letter requests to the Director's inbox and now I'm just scared.

Which is best?

1. Ask my lead teacher to write the letter of recs (even though she has a bachelor's. I thought this would be ok, to be honest).
2. Just stick with a lukewarm/mediocre letter from the Director (she'll just reiterate the mid semester evaluation that the lead teacher wrote entirely)
3. Ask my boss at work who has known me for over a year to write the letter (I'm a student assistant and I do mainly admin work, BUT she loves me and I know it'll be a great letter)

Edited November 16, 2015 by highborn

[fuzzylogician]

Can you ask the lead teacher and the director to collaborate? Basically, the lead teacher would write a draft of the letter, and the director would then take over and do the other stuff (answer the questions, add/change things in the letter, submit the letter). That said, I'm not really sure I see how the director helps, if it's the teacher who knows you best. What does the director add? If the director doesn't add anything, there isn't much of a point in getting this joint letter, as opposed to getting one directly from the teacher. 

Re: option 3, it may be a very positive letter, but it doesn't sound like it'll say anything relevant, so I don't think it can be a particularly strong letter. 

[kingslayer]

6 minutes ago, fuzzylogician said:

Can you ask the lead teacher and the director to collaborate? Basically, the lead teacher would write a draft of the letter, and the director would then take over and do the other stuff (answer the questions, add/change things in the letter, submit the letter). That said, I'm not really sure I see how the director helps, if it's the teacher who knows you best. What does the director add? If the director doesn't add anything, there isn't much of a point in getting this joint letter, as opposed to getting one directly from the teacher. 

Re: option 3, it may be a very positive letter, but it doesn't sound like it'll say anything relevant, so I don't think it can be a particularly strong letter. 

Thank you for replying! I think that's what they were supposed to be doing but it's not what's been going on. I think at this point they just don't know what they're doing. I gave them peel off labels with the addresses of where they were supposed to send forms, and they gave me the forms & labels back. I just don't have any trust anymore.

As a backup, I asked another lecturer if they would write a letter for me (she taught my research methods course, graded my research paper, got me to participate in a research competition, and I got an A in the class)