Share Your Ideas for Evaluating Teaching (Reader Response Roundup)

For a variety of reasons, no one who teaches in higher ed seems to be especially fond of student course evaluations, but just complaining about them doesn’t really do much good. And so last week I asked you to share your ideas for getting better feedback from your students. The resulting conversation—on this site as well as on Facebook—was great! Below, I’ve organized the different responses into general categories.

Explain what the evaluations are for

A number of you discussed the ways in which you make clear to students why they’re being asked to fill out the evaluations: scientistmom, aeonelpis, R Thomas Berner, and laceywil, who’s written a thoughtful piece entitled “Fair Evaluation.” In order to make sure he receives helpful feedback in narrative form from thoughtful students, Michael Corrigan encourages all of his students to write qualitative responses in addition to filling in the bubbles that gather quantitative information.

Discuss the class with your students

Three commenters — Katie King, jmutell, author of a recent ProfHacker guest post on teaching, and elkeathley — described making the class itself the topic of discussion sometimes. Get students used to talking and thinking about the teaching/learning process. Help them build a vocabulary for evaluating this process not just to coach them in writing more flattering evaluations but to make them think a little more thoroughly about how teaching and learning take place.

Ask your own questions

This was one of the two most popular suggestions, contributed by several people: laceywil, Michael Corrigan, Heidi Czerwiec, Matthew Rindge, bullski, tuxthepenguin, and elkeathley. Since the standardized questions are often too general to get at the nuances of an individual discipline — and since they don’t always ask for the kind of information that an instructor really wants to gather — write your own evaluation questions and use them as a supplement to the official forms.

Gather feedback earlier

This was tied with the previous suggestion for most popular, offered up by many: Melanie Audette, Michael Corrigan, nlclements, bullski, baturtle, cbobbitt, and dwilliams5. Don’t just wait until the last class of the semester to ask your students to consider how the course is going. Instead, try distributing evaluations at the midterm, asking your questions, responding to their feedback. You could even assign what dwilliams5 calls a “Weekly Learning Log,” the details of which can be found in the comment he left at slot #18 in last week’s discussion.

Gather feedback later

Three commenters — alan_kors, bullski, and duvalljm — advocate asking students to evaluate their courses well after they’ve completed them and the courses that come later. As duvalljm writes, such a process “can provide some sense of the long-term effect of teachers/teaching.”

Consult with others

Several people remarked that whether they’re observing you teaching or just talking with you about teaching, your fellow instructors can be very helpful: ksledge, lost_angeleno, ccprofmo, cbobbitt, and elkeathley.

And Heidi Czerwiec writes, “I’ve also taken advantage of a program on campus that has a trained Instructional Development instructor come by and interview the students and then meet with me for feedback”

How about you?

1. Do you have any suggestions we haven’t already covered?
2. What methods have you used — or would like to use — in order to improve the quality of the feedback that you get from students on your course evaluations? How well have such methods worked for you? (And here I’m not looking for ways to “game the system,” like regularly bringing in snacks for the students. I’m looking for examples of sincere attempts along the lines of the “reflexive pedagogy” that Billie has written about.)
3. What methods other than feedback from students have you used — or would like to use — to evaluate your teaching or the teaching of your colleagues? How well have such methods worked for you? For example, does your department engage in peer observation?

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user Casey Serin]