Repeat
of My Earlier Invitation: If you are
attending the annual meeting of the American Accounting Association this summer
in Chicago, I will be participating in two different panel presentations on
teaching on Monday, August 10. One is at
2 p.m. and the other is at 4 p.m. I
would love to have you there as several of us chat about the challenges of
becoming a better classroom teacher. If
you are interested, grab me after the panel presentations and we can continue
the discussion.
**
I
have written several times over the years about my basic distrust of student
evaluations. Based on the ones that I
have seen, here are some of my issues:
(1)
– Students are not encouraged to spend enough serious time considering the
questions and their responses. Some
students clearly give an appropriate amount of thought and make helpful observations. Many students appear to dash off their
opinions as if they were late for dinner.
“Good guy” doesn’t really provide much helpful feedback.
(2)
– It is easy for too much of the evaluation process to be based on mathematical
numbers that are hard to interpret. If
I go from 4.28 on a specific question in the fall to a 4.21 in the spring, does
that mean I am getting worse or maybe just more demanding?
(3)
– A teacher’s popularity has some impact on evaluations. I am not interested in popularity. I am interested in how well the person
motivates and guides students to learn.
(4)
– Most of the evaluations that I have seen have so many questions that I think
the individual questions quickly lose their impact. I do not think a lot of students have the
inclination (and possibly the ability) to draw fine distinctions between
various aspects of teaching over a long range of questions. It always interests me as to how many
students give the same numerical grade to a teacher on virtually every
question.
(5)
– The evaluations that catch people’s attention are the outliers, the ones
where the students either love you or hate you. Those people have strong opinions that can
receive too much weight when judging the quality of the education. It is easy to ignore the feelings of the
great mass of students in the middle whose opinions—although just as valid—are often
more muted.
(6)
– Evaluations really have two purposes and I think that duality causes a
problem. Student evaluations are
supposed to help provide feedback to the teacher so that he or she can improve
in the future. That seems
reasonable. In those cases, the teacher
should want to hear the bitter truth so that changes and improvements can be
made. However, evaluations are also
used by administrators who must make salary, tenure, and promotion
decisions. Then, the professor wants
every response to be as positive as possible.
Okay,
it is easy to be critical but how would I do student evaluations differently if
I were suddenly made king? Here are
some of my thoughts on the topic. I
believe this is a conversation that we should be having. My ideas clearly have some practical flaws but,
at least, they are a start toward doing something more creative.
I
would view student feedback for a teacher as a separate goal distinct from student
evaluations used by administrators. I
think you always create a problem when you try to kill those two birds with
that one stone.
As
I have written in the past (see, for example, my blog posting titled
“Congratulations!!” on May 2, 2012), at the end of every semester, I email each
student who makes the grade of an A in any of my courses to let them know of
their success. That is a true
pleasure. I pass along appropriate
congratulations. For me, that pat on
the back is important—those students did the work and made the grade. The final grade should not be an anonymous
reward. They deserve a word of praise. Then, I ask those same students to write a
paragraph on how they went about making that grade of A. I eventually accumulate all those responses and
pass them along to the next class to serve as guidance. I want each new group to understand, right
from the beginning, how to succeed in my class.
Beyond
that, those essays provide me with a peek inside the workings of my class. What do students of mine have to do to earn
an A? How much time must they spend? Where do they need to invest their
energy? What types of activities and
learning strategies proved to be beneficial?
You cannot ask a C student what it takes to make an A because they
obviously don’t know (or don’t choose to pursue that goal) but you can ask an A
student what it takes to make an A. I
read each of those essays very carefully—often many times. I try to figure out what I like about the
answers and what I don’t like.
If
one of my main teaching goals is for every student to earn an A then I want to
know what it takes to reach that achievement.
If one of those students talks about working just 30 minutes per week and
still gets an A, I need to consider making the course more demanding. If a student talks about making an A without
ever reading the textbook, I should think about whether that is consistent with
my educational goals.
I
want every student to make an A. I am
interested in what it takes to achieve that mark. That is feedback that I have found very helpful
over the years in assisting me in the evolution of my teaching. Each semester, I read numerous essays that
basically say “here is what it takes to be a successful student in Professor
Hoyle’s class.” Am I happy with what I
hear or do changes need to be made?
However,
that does not provide adequate information for administrative decisions that
must be made. So, if I were king, I
would also have a formal student evaluation process. I would give every student in every class
one assignment at the end of each semester.
I would ask them to turn in those responses directly to the school’s
administration.
The
one assignment for the student evaluation would simply be: “Please discuss this course and this teacher
as to how much they have helped to improve your critical thinking skills during this past semester. Please give as many specific
examples as possible.” Okay, there
might be a few exceptions such as a studio arts class or a basic language class
but I believe the underlying goal of a vast majority of college courses should
be the development of critical thinking skills. The student evaluation would start with a
formal definition of what the school means by critical thinking skills and then
make the assignment. This approach addresses
the central issue in the educational process in college.
If
a teacher can help a student develop his or her critical thinking skills, then
I believe most everything else will take care of itself. That is certainly my number one goal in both
my financial accounting and intermediate accounting classes.
Administrators
get the information they need for salary decisions and the like by studying these
responses. Read 75 student essays on
whether a teacher helps develop critical thinking skills and you (or anyone
else) will have a good understanding of the teacher’s success. It is not about popularity. It is not about entertainment. It is not about numbers that have a
questionable meaning. The student is
the one who benefits from the class.
When it comes to critical thinking skills, what development did that
student experience? And, of course, they need to give as many specific examples as possible.
Okay,
one immediate question is going to be:
How will the administrators be able to use this information? Here is what I would suggest. First, I think that at most schools about
20 percent of the teachers are excellent, about 60 percent of the teachers are
average, and about 20 percent of the teachers are poor. That is just my perception based on what I’ve
seen over the past 44 years. You can
easily change those percentages if you wish (possibly 25:50:25 or 30:40:30) but,
unless you teach in Lake Wobegon, please don’t tell me that all of your
teachers are above average. That is nonsense. A few teachers are excellent, a few teachers
are poor, the vast majority of teachers are average.
The
administrator reads all of these essays and judges the faculty member to be
Excellent (let’s say 20 percent), Average (60 percent), or Poor (the final 20
percent). We could argue about this but
I imagine 80-90 percent of the faculty will fall into one of those three groups
fairly easily.
After
making this judgment, the administrator writes up an evaluation for each
faculty member.
For
the teachers in the Excellent group, the administrator congratulates the
faculty member and describes why this person qualified for the top group. The administrator also points out any possible
improvements that were noted. “Excellent”
is different than “Perfect.” Improvements are always possible.
For
the teachers in the Average group, the administrator describes why that
decision was made, pointing up both the good and bad areas that seemed to be
mentioned most often by students. Then,
the administrator makes as many suggestions as possible on future efforts that
might move the teacher from the Average group to the Excellent group. That is the one fundamental goal. That should always be discussed: How can the teacher move up into the next
highest level?
For
the teachers in the Poor group, the process is much the same. First, why was the evaluation made in this
way? Second, what needs to be done to
move into the Average group? The
process should always be based on describing (1) what the evaluations indicated and (2) how the teacher can get better.
Two
evaluations:
Student
feedback to teacher: How did you make
that A?
Student
feedback for teacher evaluations: Please
discuss this course and this teacher as to how much they have helped to improve
your critical thinking skills this semester.
Would
that really work better than the system we have? I honestly do not know but I do think it is
time to have that conversation and start experimenting to see if better
evaluations are even possible. I just
think, for the systems I have seen, improvement is needed.
