We all know what happens at the end of term. We receive a small folder from our Dean or Chair. It contains a packet of pages, half of them scantron-style and the other half open-answer worksheets. Our students are about to lay down some wisdom on us, and let us know how we could go from sinner to winner with just a few easy steps."Adjust your style of dress!"
"Add more lectures!"
"Stop lecturing so much!"
Be more interactive / less interactive, more vibrant, more stodgy, less reading, less assignments, more As, fewer Fs. Do what I want, but not what they want, and come down harder on disruptive students who are not me.
Sigh.
We've all received these pearls of wisdom, and we have all struggled with how to make adjustments, to be "student-centered" without sacrificing the content. And we have struggled with the peculiar tendency of all positive remarks to go unnoticed, while that one ore two negative remark sticks with us for months.
I stopped reading these, years ago. Once it became separate from my ability to get teaching work the following semester, I stopped caring about the bull shit students advised me. It almost always dealt with my dress, hair, marital status, or other sexist crap. One student thought I was too focused on misuse of technology during class time. Whatever.
I bring this up today for one reason: last month I gave a presentation to a large group of roughly 200 professionals on using technology in the classroom. They provided feedback for my presentation. These are peers of mine, people whom I respect. And I had to steel myself as I clicked on the links to get my results.
Out of 80 respondents, I received glowing reviews. One of the most popular presenters. And two assholes who felt that I was Captain Obvious or Redundant Rita.
For the life of me, I cannot remember the wording of the 80 praising evals. Only the two negative ones. Can't shake it off, even when the opinions are from people I actually respect.
Evals are evil.
I still read mine. Heck, I still do them in every class, though I'm no longer required to: not only does the feedback make students feel better, but it helps keep the data pool large enough that people going up for tenure, etc., aren't forced to compete only with each other.
ReplyDeleteYou're right that they're psychologically problematic -- as is the feedback we often give students -- and that they're frequently useless. There's something about them, though, that I find useful, and I'm not entirely sure I can articulate what... it's a window into our audience's thought processes that we don't get otherwise. Maybe that's it.
I just wish it wasn't an administrative process. If it were just a chance for communication, it might be less evil. But it's not: it's part of an evil system.
I do the same. I get pretty go evals and I have a thick skin anyway so I don't mind reading them. You're right that it is an opportunity to see what they think. I view my lectures as a performance. I am a performer and they are my audience. At some level, I have to connect with them. They won't learn, can't learn, if we don't. I suppose that I respect their opinions (especially the positive comments) because they should evaluate me.
DeleteNow, the way our admin uses those evals and the fact that they are the only way teaching is evaluated - that burns me up.
It's like that episode of Frasier, The Focus Group. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxdEodnhdvA
ReplyDeleteI'm assuming these evals were anonymous? You only have to look at much of the internet to see what that does to people's good sense.
ReplyDeleteAt the institution I used to teach at, anonymous comments were welcome. Doing so, apparently, made the students more "honest" or "truthful".
DeleteYeah, right. It simply gave them a safe haven from which they could trash one's reputation and not suffer the consequences for making false statements.
You know, I have to say that I have experienced many types of mystery in my job so far, but I've never had real issues with evaluations. The worst I've gotten is the occasional student who makes an oddball comment like "His shirts are too colorful and it's distracting" or a few students giving me low scores on things like "Instructor is available outside of the classroom" (which is true, if you don't come to office hours, you don't use the time I spend after class answering questions, and you decide not to email me or message me through the LMS).
DeleteMost students are fair in their evaluations of me, with a few offering constructive criticism. And nobody in the administration has ever batted an eye when I came in with a few low scores here and there.
I've had students lie and cheat to try and do well in my classes, but none of them have ever truly raised a ruckus or tried to tarnish my reputation. Perhaps they're just too lazy or disorganized to try and do something like that, but I think in reality I just usually end up with students who recognize that I'm a person, too.
I'm pretty sure women receive comments relating to hair, clothing, and demeanor much more often then men do. I could always be wrong, but it enrages me much more than the content itself of each eval.
DeleteAgreed, women get the worst of it, and it's unprofessional behavior that we should be trying to get our students beyond, but since they're anonymous....
DeleteI get very few appearance comments, but I rather suspect that's because students would see it as mean, or at least shooting fish in a barrel. Or maybe they realize I don't much care what they think of my appearance? Why, yes, I'm fat, my hair is gray, and most of my clothes were probably never in style, and certainly aren't now. It's probably also clear that I'm not really interested in changing any of the above.*
Delete*Mind you, I'm not saying that the lack of such comments means that my appearance has no effect on my numerical evaluations (or that my appearance has no effect on my larger professional prospects, about which I worry more. Well, a bit more. I also pay more attention to what I wear to conferences than what I wear to teach.) I'm pretty sure that the fact that I look like a pretty traditional version of somebody's mom/grandmother, but am probably more traditionally "masculine" in my interpersonal style (more "that's tough; pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and keep going" than "oh; poor baby") creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.
I feel your pain Academic Monkey. I can get fair/good evals, but I only remember and obsess over the mean ones. I realize not everyone will like me or my instructional style, but bad evals depress me.
ReplyDeleteEver see the Internet comic, "Normal person + anonymity + audience = Total fuckwad"? Who cares what a bunch of sheep fuckers think, anyway? I haven't read mine in years. Every semester I throw mine in a big pile behind a file cabinet where they can't be easily fished out, with a big, satisfying PLUNK! Now that they're becoming entirely online, it'll be easier to ignore them entirely.
ReplyDeleteTwo years ago I moved from one institution to another. In a move that felt very ceremonial, I threw out all my evals from institution #1. Eight years of bull shit student reactions. It was pretty awesome.
DeleteWhy yes, I do remember mention of Dickwad Theory. With the reminder of an actual comic, I just now decided to research it a little bit more. Here is what I came up with:
DeleteGreen Blackboards (And Other Anomalies)
Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
Being a dickwad on the Internet – the importance of perceived identity value in online interactions
This shit fascinates the hell out of me. Please to enjoy as well.
It sounds like it was a very successful presentation (and I'll bet the two fuckwads were just jealous). But yes, I know the feeling. It's always the negative comments that stick in the mind.
ReplyDeleteAnd why do they stick in the mind? Because you really care about doing a good job, about challenging students to do better.
ReplyDeleteOh this means a lot, Pangloss. Thanks for writing it.
DeleteAnd why do they stick in the mind? Because you really care about doing a good job, about challenging students to do better.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read my student evaluations since I was going up for full professor, which was several years after our institution had gone to all-online evals. The useful or constructive criticism was close to nil, not worth the angst over the negativity, which was very hard to ignore despite my rather thick skin.
ReplyDeleteThe likert scale data come from a large enough fraction of the class that they may reflect some semblence of reality, but the only students who take the time to enter freeform comments are those holding extreme opinions. This selection bias cannot be overlooked. And as Frod says, who cares what a bunch of [insert epithet of choice] enboldened by anonymity think?
Due to some stupid software setting, students can fill out an eval for any person listed as instructor in the couse's site on the LMS. Because I have a role in assessment across several courses, I am an "instructor" in courses whose students I've never stood in front of; I nevertheless got some scathing comments about my boring lectures. Yeah, real reliable stuff.
The last time I read ANY student evals was when writing in support of a colleague's tenure application. I cherry-picked some good comments and wrote that they corroborated my own observations when sitting in on the class. I also said that any negative evals -- few though they were -- were not to be trusted because the research shows that they tend to come from students who are upset over their poor performance in the class. Such poor students are by definition non-expert , hence their lay criticism can be readily dismissed.