Teaching evaluations
I got my teaching evaluations back yesterday.
I have been thinking lately about faculty reviews and teaching evaluations because they are such an issue at school lately. Our student ratings are incorporated in our annual reviews, so the numbers count in our overall annual evaluation by the school administration. Now, on the one hand, this doesn’t actually mean much since there’s no material reward for a good review these days and no one’s job is threatened by an average review.
My questions have been running the course of how pointless and aggravating teaching evaluations often are yet how my happiness is still tied to them. Frankly, I’m not sure what teaching evaluations mean. In the ideal sense, they measure whether or not your teaching is effective. Even though I have a strong philosophy about what I consider good teaching, I still question who knows what way is best? Commitment to a certain type of pedagogy, for example active learning vs. “old school lecturing,” is political and cultural. As with any ideology, I do think mine is the best and I will shout that from the mountain top. There’s always that niggling doubt that I could be wrong. So teaching evaluations reflect beliefs in certain pedagogies which might not be consistent with the teacher’s approach.
Let’s set that issue aside and just start with the thought that I’m confident my teaching style is the most effective (I am). Let’s move on to the problem of what’s getting evaluated. In my experience, students give you high scores on everything or low scores on everything depending on how they feel about you. There’s probably some research somewhere to say either way. However, when I look at my own reviews, that is what I see consistently. Very rarely do the replies vary based on questions. They vary across students, yes, but not within the questions themselves. Someone who gives me a 4 for the first question pretty much gives me 4’s all the way down, maybe with one or two variations up or down.
This is most apparent when students rate things that are not within the instructor’s control, such as the quality of the textbook for multi-section courses. It seems to me that the answer to that question should be relatively consistent across all sections. Either the textbook sucks, or it doesn’t. How the textbook is presented will vary, yes, but the quality of the book itself is a constant. So when I look across three sections of the same class and see that the responses to the textbook question fairly parallel the responses overall, it makes me question the whole point of teaching evaluations. If they like me, they like the book. If they don’t like me, they don’t like the book. To me this suggests that teaching evaluations might as well ask just one question: How do you rate your professor?
As Stanley Fish has written recently, teaching evaluations reward pretty packaging. I’ve always called this the “happy meal.” I’ve always sought some sort of marketable package that sneaks some nutritional value into the whole thing. It’s a hard balance to find and often my students walk away with the cheap plastic toy and nothing more. Also, honestly, how much nutrition is in a happy meal? Not much. As Fish points out, though, teaching evaluations encourage fast food teaching (not to belabor the whole paradigm shift to consumer-driven education). Teaching evaluations sometimes seem like comment cards at the fast food restaurant. Customers fill them out when they’re really happy or really angry and their answers are knee-jerk, non-critical, hormonal responses. Management in major universities doesn’t genuinely care about the evaluations unless there’s a glaring problem. So the increased push to measure quality and to reward or punish based on teaching evaluations shows how much of an actual shift has occurred in higher education.
Reflecting on all this makes me wonder if students are evaluating what we want them to evaluate. For instance, one question asks whether the instructor connects assignments to the learning outcomes of the class. This is a good question on the surface and probably a common one. Still, I can’t picture my students being able to state the class learning outcomes even by the end of the semester. They could probably say something like, “I’m supposed to learn how to give a speech,” or “I’m supposed to learn how to have better relationships.” Beyond that, I’m not hopeful that they could remember the details without prompting. If I gave them specific questions, like tell me what you learned about listening, they could. I doubt seriously they are thinking about objectives A through G listed on the syllabus and whether the assignments missed objective C. They might have an overall sense of whether they learned what they were supposed to, what the course advertised they would learn, or what they wanted to learn when they enrolled. So what exactly is the question measuring, since the responses are knee-jerk, glandular responses based on whether or not the students liked the class.
Of course, my response to my own evaluations is to remember what I tell my students about their grades. They are a snapshot of one particular moment that might or might not reflect my overall performance and capability. I totally bombed in one class because of the chemistry; I totally sucked in a given semester because of life problems; I was on a teaching high because I found some exciting new approach; I had to teach a topic or class that I hate.
The irony of this position is that I invest so much meaning and feeling into the evaluations. I am completely externally motivated and I constantly seek validation from others. I’ve always gotten my strokes from teaching and so when my evaluations are good I’m ecstatic. When they are bad, I’m depressed. My evaluations started out embarrassingly low when I began my teaching career. It wasn’t until I found a pedagogy and style consistent with my beliefs that I could get better numbers. When I moved to Louisiana my numbers dropped, not dramatically, but enough to disappoint me. It took several semesters to receive my normally high evaluations. In other words, I struggled to find the happy meal.
At BRCC, the numbers declined for me, which has been devastating. By most people’s standards, my evaluations are respectably high, but I’ve been spoiled by having outstanding numbers for such a large part of my teaching life. I’ve been in constant tweak mode at BRCC (which I naturally do anyway) and I’m slowly seeing a return. I thought I blew a class this semester and it turned out not to be my lowest evals. Now, unfortunately, we’re shifting to online evaluations at school (good idea in the long run, but it sucks in the short term), so we’re having problems getting a large pool of responders. I don’t have much faith in the numbers I got this semester. I do, however, have faith that my numbers are rising.
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