An und für sich

Many of us who teach love to complain about student evaluations:  what they mean, how they’re used, the retaliation that is often expected with them, etc.  I think that this is an important question in academia–the place of user feedback within the culture–but the issue is heightened with websites like Rate Your Professor.  If you didn’t see it, The Chronicle of Higher Education recently profiled the now-defunct blog, Rate Your Students, which was a clearinghouse of professors complaining about their students and occasionally going down the dark alley of student evaluations.  (The Chronicle failed to mention that Rate Your Students was transfigured into a new manifestation, called College Misery, and it’s largely more of the same.)

The college where I teach has moved into using an online student evaluation tool called IDEA.  The good thing about IDEA is that it allows the professor to select which classroom activities or learning objectives were essential or important and then let the students evaluate based on those goals.  The IDEA process allows the numbers to be compared to the local institution and all other classes within the same discipline between all schools that participate with IDEA.  Students do their evaluations outside of the classroom, online, at their convenience, so there is no pressure of the professor intimidating the students and classroom time is not wasted on the evaluations.

This sounds good in theory, but in practice, some questions are raised.  Does it matter what students are doing–or where they are–when they do their evaluations?  (I recently had a couple that was doing premarital counseling with me take their online personality and premarital assessment battery tests on their iPhones, and even basic information was entered incorrectly.)  Is it always helpful to evaluate students at different institutions or in the same discipline for different courses?  Do students really think that saying that a professor is too tough on writing is a negative reflection on the professor?

On one level, the numerical responses are interesting.  But they often show that there will always be one or two students so irritated that they simply answer all of the questions negatively, even when the questions aren’t applicable to the particular classroom situation.  The same could be said of positive evaluations, as well.

I understand that it is important to understand the student culture at the particular colleges where we teach, and evaluations are sometimes helpful for this, and I have learned, I think, to present my courses to my students in a way that might not be the way I would want to do it but in a way that I think works to entertain my middle-of-the-road student enough to trick them into learning.

But what I usually think about–and am in instructed in workshops on campus–is how to designate my course goals in a way that will yield positive results.  And I have even started to re-think the calendar of the course based on when students are doing their evaluations.  For example, semesters where I have scheduled a final exam that falls after the closing date for their online evaluations the comments tend to be about how unfair the test is, etc., etc., and the numerical scores become lower.  One semester I had so many students involved with academic integrity issues that I didn’t think anything about the evaluations were reliable; my position of a pastor of a denomination most of them are unfamiliar with makes me a target for being subjective, opinionated, arrogant, etc., in their comments.

But I have learned to be extraordinarily neutral.  I’ll say things like, “if you want my opinion about this, I’ll tell it to you outside of class.”  “As someone not a member of this particular church, I can’t really comment on this.”  Many of the students are Methodist, since it is officially “related” to the denomination, and when issues related to the Methodists come up–including a local story of a Methodist pastor who murdered two wives and provoked a suicide in his church office before he voluntarily surrendered his ordination–I say I don’t know anything about the Methodists, because of my back history with trying to get ordained in the Methodist Church, which one student found out about from her pastor (so as to discredit professors who teach world religions in colleges) and later used it against me in the classroom and on my student evaluation comments.  I even give the conservative students extra talk time when talking about issues, and do so openly because, I say, they’re getting the liberal college professor thing from me.  This way of muting myself is totally “not me,” I often wonder whether I am really challenging students in the classroom because I am holding back my own ideas or interpretations, but I think I’ve got it down for this particular group of students that I tend to get in the 100 level class.

There are other nuances I could get into here, but here’s my payoff.  This past semester I worked very hard on improving my courses, made sure I had coffee before the 8 AM class, even took time to pray the Anglican rosary before class sometimes, and was mindful every time I walked into the classroom of what the students would be thinking of me and my presentation.  I dressed more casually.  I talked to the athletic students about their sports scores.  I talked Vera Bradley with some of the students.  It isn’t that I wasn’t interested in the students beyond grading them before, but I was very intentional about this, along with making myself to appear to be as neutral on just about every issue that came up in our current events time.

So my student evaluations are better than they’ve ever been, and I feel good about it.  It’s a great feeling when I feel like I did a good job teaching the students and that they, on the whole, appreciated it to the point that I get an acceptable evaluation from a tough crowd.  It also helped that I had a great group of students, no one went looking for loopholes in the syllabus, no one really challenged my attendance policy, and I had no issues of academic integrity.  I didn’t have the education major who is about to graduate asking to make an appointment to offer suggestions in my “pedagogical approach.”  But this isn’t always going to be the case where everything went right every semester.

But my question now is “what now?”  Do I keep doing what I am doing?  Many of us often harp about how high school teachers teach to an exam in the No Child Left Behind system, but am I now teaching to my evaluations to the new generation of No Child Left Behind students?  Does this have a negative impact on my teaching; is my sense of success a false one?  Is my sense of success this semester really misplaced in terms of the function of my particular 100 level class within the larger core curriculum of the college?  It pains me a little that one comment I had this past semester was that I am “too objective.”  That’s what I’m going for, but that’s not me at all!  But at the same time, my presentation and change of personality in the classroom has helped students get past whatever barriers they might have with an overweight preacher talking about Islam at 8 AM.

I’ve always been very skeptical of student evaluations, and I still am, even when they’re working for me for a change.  Or is it because no matter how good they might be, they could be completely different the next semester?