Good people,
Now that my semester has ended, I am once again reminded, as I get back my student course evaluations how much I hate student course evaluations. I hate them. Even when I get good (or even very good) evaluations, I hate them.
I hate them because I have no reason to think that they work (see also here) or are fair, and they often simply don't make sense. I have linked to just a few reasons to be worried, but the reasons to worry go beyond these particular studies. The amount of recent work on cognitive and implicit bias, I suspect, should be more than sufficient for us to be quite skeptical. And make no mistake about it: I hate them though I am a tall, gregarious, white, straight, cis-gendered male identified English speaking faculty member from a professional family upbringing on a campus overwhelmingly white, straight, English-speaking students raised in professional and executive elite families (I take these later socio-economic terms from Jean Anyon's work on social class in elementary schools). I have no doubt that they are unfair to colleagues that I know, love, respect and admire greatly, all the more so if these colleagues who don't have the privileges I do vis-a-vis teaching, credibility and authority in the classroom.
Beyond those problems listed above, I find student evaluations often incoherent because they assume certain standardization for teaching. I, for example, often ask students to collaborate on the goal setting we do in the class, determining the norms of good conversation, collaborating on quiz questions, even helping to adjust the schedule and larger activities because I believe that they ask students to engage in and learn very high level metacognitive skills that push them to consider the goals and means to a good education. When the student evaluations form comes out and asks: "does your instructor set clear goals?" the question is ambiguous: I do have clear second order goals, namely, that they work on, practice and develop skills in setting goals. The evaluation form does little to clarify. A more concrete example is that the forms our institution uses is written as if all classes have one instructor, and yet I teach a class with many (I co-teach a class with 5 others).
Part of the problem is that the goals for these evaluations are not merely mixed, they seem at cross purposes: at my school, they are touted as a way to learn and improve one's teaching and as the primary (and in some departments only real) way to compare and evaluation the teaching of faculty. But, of course, what I want to know to improve my teaching and how I do, relative to my peers, might be quite different.
First, I think we who are tenured faculty (and especially those of us who have administrative roles, as chairs, etc.) ought to be working within our institutions for significant change. And we (with faculty, and especially those in administrative roles) ought to be working to mitigate the damage, particularly to those who belong to underrepresented groups within the academy or on our campuses. But that might not be particularly helpful to most readers of this blog… at least not yet.
What else we can do is disambiguate the two goals and at least find deeper, better, more authentic ways to learn how we are doing as instructors and how to do better for the particular students we have. And here, there is something for the readers of this blog to do, and this can be started the next time you teach. Here are some initial thoughts, and I would be very interested to hear what others are doing, as well.
1. Don't wait until the end of the semester to learn about how the class (and you, and the students) are doing.
The most important reason not to wait until the end of the semester is that, by that point, you cannot have any impact on the class. This is important both because it is a lost opportunity to improve the class, and because you miss out on the chance to show students that you care about their learning by showing them that you are taking them and their learning seriously by listening to what they think will help them learn. Of course, just because they say they would prefer X doesn't mean we should do it. But it is often the case that there are small changes that might not matter at all to you or to the curriculum, traditionally understood, that would really help students. I find, for example, that students often feel really respected if I move a quiz to better accommodate their schedule, or–I learned–that students found it really helpful for me to simply write a "to do" list each day when we get to class to give them a sense for the particular structure of the class period. Neither take much effort. And just as useful as making changes, I find, is that when they ask for things and we cannot do them, I get to explain why we can't, which gives me an opportunity to rearticulate the goals and purposes of the class and the activities of the class.
There are many ways to get good feedback in the middle of the semester. Some options: short "1 thing to keep doing/1 thing to stop doing/1 thing to start doing" lists works. Or a simple reflection on how class is going will give students a chance to let you know. One thing I think is really important is that we ask students not just about us (which is often where their focus is when I ask about how class is going), but also about themselves and about their peers. That is, I ask about 1 think I should keep doing and also one thing they should keep doing and one thing their peers should keep doing, and so on.
2.Prepare students at the end of the semester, on the formal evaluations, to do it well.
Student evaluation forms often ask about how clearly the class goals were articulated and to what extent the class met those goals. But students have often not looked at those goals for a while, and so answering might rely more on impression than careful reflection. Therefore, before students get the final course evaluation, I always have some kind of reflection assignment and discussion. I often ask students, for example, to write letters to students who will take the same class in the future, thinking about the goals of the class and how we tried to reach those goals. I also like to do a "To Done" list: we simply list all of the ideas and activities, debates and conversations that we have done over the course of the semester and put them all on the board for us to see and reflect on. I find students are often amazed by how much we have done, and it gives them a chance to think carefully about how much they have learned. And after these kinds of reflections (individually, and as a group), I then pass out the student course evaluations.
3. Get extra information at the end of the semester beyond what you learn on the formal evaluations.
I often want much more information at the end of the semester than that which will appear on the formal student course evaluations. As I mentioned above, I often do this with a letter students write. But I often ask for very specific additional feedback from students on my own evaluation form. I find this kind of informal feedback particularly useful when I teach a new course, or when I change a class I am teaching significantly.
4. Read carefully and learn from the data you get.
I often find that I need time away from the evaluations after I have initially read them; first, the horror, then I can come back, a few days later, read them with fresh eyes and learn from them. When I do that, I am looking for trends–it is easy to get caught by something one student says (very good or, more likely, very negative); and there are often contradictory evaluations (this class was way to hard; this class was really easy). For some aspects, any feedback is worth considering (e.g., disrespect); for most, I am looking for a general trend (e.g., the class was well organized); and for some, finally, I want a mix (some students should find a class really hard and others should find it relatively easy, assuming there is a diversity of abilities in the classroom).
5. Team up with students to inquire.
I strongly recommend bringing students (often former students) into the process of figuring out how one's teaching is going and whether one is teaching effectively. There is an increasingly large literature that suggests this is an important way to study teaching and learning (see for example, here and here), and it is one that might align, particularly, with the goals some of us have about student empowerment and teaching for democratic skills/citizenship.
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