This is where my friend’s trick (noted in the previous thread) of asking the students to step back, to see their evaluations of us as reflections on themselves, and to use the opportunity for professional development is really smart, and perhaps can help a lot.

Something that seems pretty right-on to me about Historiann’s original list is that it is *course focused* not prof focused. This is an important distinction that I think gets lost in the way most uni evals are administered — they are called course evals, but students and profs alike tend to think of them as “professor evaluations”. This is really bad and wrong and universities ought to work against it.

When I think back to my undergrad & grad experience, *mostly* how much I liked a course and a prof correlated well. But in retrospect, I did also learn from a few profs whom I actively disliked at the time and with whom I still would not want to be at, say, a dinner party. Nevertheless, they were knowledgeable and able to transmit that knowledge effectively. Things I learned in that class still shape my current thinking. But had evals existed at the time, I would have been *dying* to slam them.

Because you sit there looking at the profs all semester long, and courses start to feel like they are as much about them and how you feel about them as they are about the content. This of course operates with double force on women, people of color, people with an accent, a disability, anybody generally subject to an evaluative “gaze” and/or general social prejudices — and then eval time comes, and the evals encourage this by asking not just about the course but stuff like, “did the instructor show enthusiasm?”

I mean, come on. A prof who taught me 25% of what I know sat slumped in a chair and lectured in perfectly-formed paragraphs (my class notes read like a text) delivered in a monotone with occasional sardonic asides. He was in fact passionate about the material, but he didn’t exactly “show” it.

We can’t escape the fact that our personas affect everything, but it should be part of the process to make everyone aware that evals grade the course, not whether the prof is groovy. I think person-directed questions should be re-phrased or eliminated. We do this as teachers, and rightly so — who among us has not gone out of our way to be scrupulously task-focused in grading a paper by a student who gets under our skin, or by the same token a student we find funny and charming?

This would also really help us to face evals more forthrightly — if we read the results as not about *us* (“but I don’t suck! Those kids are mean little sobs!”) but about the courses we teach and how they are going it could be much easier to face the task of dealing with what is not working. Because there are, really, limits to how much we can (or should be willing to, and certainly to how much we should be pressured to) re-tool ourselves to meet the demands of student audiences. But we should be endlessly willing to re-work courses until they are successful.

I’m completely with you on wanting to blow off students who feel entitled to a degree because they paid tuition, who don’t pay attention in class, who don’t put in the time or work, or who don’t show up to class at all. The students I’m concerned about are the ones who are in class, taking notes, doing the reading most of the time, occasionally showing up to office hours–but who are still struggling because there is a huge gap between learning in college and getting good grades in high school (which some students mistake for learning).

Yeah, because earning a Master’s degree shouldn’t take EFFORT, should it?

When universities are selling themselves as no-work, no-hassle places that will just print up a diploma to order, I suppose it’s inevitable that that’s the kind of student we attract. I just feel badly for the students who come here to learn something and to be challenged, and I feel more of an obligation to serve them than to serve the lazy and unmotivated students.

I find your comments about the consequences of “high-stakes testing” on students very interesting. I’ve noticed that my students at Baa Ram U. now are less capable than they were when I arrived 8 years ago at thinking creatively or tackling an intellectual problem without a great deal of coaching. I think this is very much the No Child Left Behind generation now at our doorstep.

But, here’s the reason I harp so much on student responsibility for their own education: At my uni, many students apparently think registering and paying for a course is all they have to do. Many don’t attend class (or they text-message and update their facebook pages while in class), they don’t take notes, they don’t do the reading, they don’t do assignments. (I think on-line courses have encouraged this model of “no work” as the ideal for college courses, but that’s another subject I guess.) If a student is unwilling to do these things, then they’re unwilling to earn a college degree, and that’s NOT my problem to fix. You may think that’s too absolute a viewpoint, but that’s where I am. I can honestly say that a student who attends my classes and does all of the readings and writing assignments with a modicum of pride in their work will take home a B or better. The differences I see in my students all have to do with effort, not with natural brilliance or having been home-schooled or sent to a private school versus public schools. My A students went to the same schools and took the same dumb tests that their classmates took–they just have figured out that WORK is required of them, and that’s a rather counter-cultural view of education on my campus.

Another beef: too many parents have bought into the notion that college is a 4- (or 5- or 6-) year party, so they tolerate their children sitting in my survey classes and bringing home Cs, Ds, and Fs. I just don’t get the waste of time–mine and theirs–and money. And the even weirder thing is that many of them are paying their own money to flunk out or do poorly. Again: what’s the point?

I work (for now–who knows if we’ll survive these budget cuts) in a teaching center at a huge University of California campus. So I totally get the concern about teaching very large classes, and I think Historiann’s list works well as a starting point from which to evaluate individual class meetings of these kinds of courses.

But.

I have to disagree that teaching is disconnected from learning to the extent you seem to be saying, Historiann. Yes, students are responsible for their own learning, but at my campus, at least, students are coming from high schools where they’ve been subjected to a regime of high-stakes testing. So they’re very, very good at absorbing information and reproducing it–at the level of “knowledge” or “comprehension” or maybe “application” in Bloom’s taxonomy of the cognitive domain. But push them further, to analysis, synthesis, or evaluation, and they stumble. And these are the top 12.5% of high school graduates in the state. At this point, I think, we do become responsible for their learning, particularly for lower-division students. These are intellectual skills they need to be taught.

Course evaluations, at least as conducted at my institution, don’t always ask the right questions. They don’t ask about an instructor’s success in motivating and enabling a student to learn. Plus, coming at the end of the course, evaluations are really, I think, about how much students like the instructor’s personality and what each student believes his or her grade in the course will be. (I believe there are studies backing me up on this, but I don’t have them at hand.)

To evaluate the teaching of a course, you need to look at more than just what happens when the person stands in front of the class. You need to look at the syllabus, at the readings, at the activities or labs or field trips, at the assignments, at office hours. This doesn’t get done enough, at least at my institution, and the people who come to me for help are either (a) really motivated to improve their own teaching because they genuinely give a damn or (b) going up for tenure and need to beef up the teaching portion of their portfolios with a report from us.

Briefly, on PowerPoint: It’s not used well by the majority of faculty on my campus. I observe courses where people use PowerPoint, and I work in a large classroom building, so I sometimes lurk in the hallways and watch people teach through open doorways. In the sciences and social sciences in particular, the slides they show, in concert with their lectures, have very little pedagogical purpose. Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint should be required reading for these folks.

First I should have said evals were a *cheesy* bone, rather than a sleazy one. Sleazy is too harsh, while cheesy does enough damage to the condescending cynicism by which students were initially invited to be co-pilots in the course and tough customers of the final product. We had scared the hell out of the administrators, and they wanted to see us gnawing on something besides their ankles. With some good reason, I would say.

We assuredly do want students to become those kinds of observers and thinkers. But it took me years to realize that the cranky doofus with the iron-burned shirt had been throwing some pretty hard curve balls at us, while the “Little General” (as we called the cool psych guy) had been, at that early point in his career, mostly just styling. How I would have pronounced on the matter a week before finals is mostly just a curiosity now. I really sort of meant what I said the other day (in the other thread) about the obit. as the definitive evaluation tool. We could wish it otherwise, but wishing doesn’t make it so.

I agree with perpetua’s response to Carl, although I think he raises an important point for discussion. Perhaps “organization” suggested that I think a roman-numeral rigid outline for each day’s lecture or discussion is the way to go for every class, all the time. That’s not what I meant to imply. Sometimes that works–but perhaps I should have called point #1 “have a plan.” I think it’s fine for discussions to meander somewhat to ensure that students have an opportunity to let ideas roll around in their heads and to respond to each other. (Indeed, I spend a minimum 1/2 or 2/3 of my classes in discussion, so I’m very open to serendipities of discovery, I think!)

I like Geoff’s trick for harassment of students in the guise of “how’m'I doin’,” a la NYC Mayor Ed Kotch in the 1980s. I think I might borrow that for my big survey class this term. Brilliant!

Do some people *still* think that PowerPoint is teh evilll? Janice’s comment strikes me as back to the 1990s, for some reason (not b/c of you Janice, but because of that silly accusation that PP = bad teaching.) I switched to PP mostly because I teach a 123-person survey every once in a while, and the students had a hard time seeing my outlines on the overhead machine. Then, I came to really appreciate and enjoy the ways in which one can integrate text and images in PP, so I use it in all but my seminar classes, all of the time now. I agree with you Janice: people can either teach well or indifferently, with or without technology.

I think Indyanna makes some interesting points about what sticks with students, and what doesn’t. Some people think that if they’re talking at the front of the room, that’s the only way in which “learning” happens. I don’t think that’s the case at all, and in fact it behooves us to mix up the activities in our teaching. What works for some students won’t work for all. (And thanks for the bid for the crusty old coots! I had about a zillion of them at Bryn Mawr in the 1980s and 90s, and we made fun of them, but a number of them taught some really interesting and valuable classes. Imagine that!)

But I’ve witnessed what I consider to be truly disorganized courses – the readings constantly change, the assignments are constantly modified, the professor wanders off topic all the time during discussion or lecture, and the students are incapable of connecting the dots – not because they’re lazy or can’t think critically but because the prof has really failed at hir primary duty at communicating clearly and effectively. The students literally did not have the core concepts of the class explained to them, or have sense of how the bigger picture fit together (b/c the prof had no bigger pictures was just rambling for the entire term). One small example – the prof repeatedly makes a reference to the Paris commune as a key historical moment central to the lecture, but at no time ever explains what it is. In a big lecture, students are too anxious to raise their hands and ask, so they spend the whole time not having any idea what anything means. To me, clarity and organization are paramount because these are the primary foundational structures to a class that permit all else to happen. Clarity and organization don’t have to look like a perfectly outlined lecture, done in a conventional manner. (Also in survey courses, there is a lot of “info dump” for good or for ill – just information the students need to know, and that material needs to be presented clearly. Not everything at a uni can be a critical thinking exercise.)

That said, I feel like most of our discussion here reflects the reality of most of our classrooms – or I should speak for myself, it reflects the reality of my class experience: 40 students, mixed lecture and discussion (but technically a ‘lecture’ class), majors and non majors, students of all kinds of backgrounds and abilities. I rarely have the opportunity to teach seminars (1 time in 3 yrs). Seminar teaching and lecture teaching (even with discussion) are two different animals. The kind of discussion-based courses that Carl described is right-on I think, but at the same time the professor still has to be clear about the purpose of the course and the readings, and be organized (ie, have read the material thoroughly, have some sense of a few key elements it would be great if they got out of it, and be adept at subtly directing and encouraging conversation). A disorganized prof in a discussion class might not have done the reading, have not put any thought in how the class should go, and exert no control over how the discussion goes, so if it gets derailed ze has no idea how to get it back on track (or doesn’t care).