Welcome to Teaching, a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week, Dan describes how the engineering school at one university uses student evaluations to identify effective professors, Beckie shares a story from a reader about how she changed her course to respond to current events, and we announce the winners of a new teaching prize. Stick around for a referral to another newsletter we think you might be interested in.
The ‘Right People’ in Intro Courses
About 17 years ago, faculty members at Vanderbilt University’s School of Engineering were rebooting their introduction-to-engineering course to make it more project-based and relevant to the real world. But they also knew how important teaching quality was to their students’ ability to persist in the major, said Christopher Rowe, director of the division of general engineering. “If the curriculum was in a good place, but we had ineffective instructors,” he said, “we’d almost be shooting ourselves in the foot.”
The course was designed in such a way that academic leaders could gauge the impact that professors had. All of the school’s 300 freshmen take the same introductory course, which meets in separate rooms at the same time and is taught by different professors. Students switch about every four weeks into smaller, self-selected subsections where they take, say, chemical, mechanical, or electrical engineering. “It became very clear very quickly that we needed to get the right people teaching these classes,” said Rowe, who is a professor of the practice of engineering management.
Elsewhere in academe, the characteristics of the instructors who teach introductory courses have been found to have a relationship with students’ progress in a major, according to recent research. But these studies looked at factors like whether the instructors were employed part-time or on the tenure track. To judge whether the “right” people were teaching its introductory courses, Vanderbilt used the qualitative portions of student course evaluations.
Students there are encouraged to be very candid and specific, said Rowe, which he says makes the reliability of their comments fairly robust. Administrators, department heads, and faculty members can get a good sense of things like students’ views of the inclusivity of the teaching and the degree to which the material is connected to current events. “We started seeing a pattern,” he said.
If, for example, a noticeable number of students wrote about how a subsection was lecture-based, had less hands-on work than other sections, or was taught a little above their level, Rowe and his colleagues could start a discussion with department chairs about what they were seeing. And, on the flip side, if students wrote that they particularly enjoyed an assignment, or couldn’t wait to take another course with a professor, that was important data, too. “You look for the superlatives,” Rowe said.
One department saw a pattern of negative language for two of its instructors, so it changed both how the material was presented and who was teaching it. The evaluations improved and enrollments increased. Professors were happier, too, Rowe said. After all, no one wants to be stuck in a situation that isn’t working.
What’s something you’ve learned about your teaching from the comments in your student evaluations? How did it help you change how you teach? Email me at dan.berrett@chronicle.com and I may use it in a future newsletter.
Changing a Course to Cover Campus Controversy
Last week, we asked if you had ever overhauled a course to respond to current events. Lillian Nave, a senior lecturer at Appalachian State University, wrote in to tell us how she changed her “Art4Peace” course from “an international look at public art and peace” to focus instead on “upheavals over Confederate statues on Southern campuses” — an issue that was directly affecting her own students — last fall.
Nave also shared a newly published article, for which she was the lead author, that explains the course in depth. Changing “Art4Peace,” the authors wrote, was risky. Not only was Nave taking on a controversial topic with a diverse group of first-year students, she was doing so as a non-tenure-track instructor who had just landed a three-year contract after a decade of annual appointments.
Nave decided the course would work best if she and her students explored the topic as “a classroom community of equals,” the article explains. To encourage that, Nave asked them to call her by her first name, and spent part of each class period sitting on the floor among students’ chairs to avoid her six-foot height coming off as intimidating. These changes helped create an atmosphere in which students took on much of the responsibility for their own learning. The new direction was a bit uncomfortable at first, the authors explain. But it worked well in the end.
The course covered “multiple reasons why Confederate statues were erected and various critical analyses of their creation, why people want them to remain, why people consider them racist, why others did not, and how art in general, and public sculpture in particular, could offer a multitude of interpretations,” as well as a comparison to post-apartheid South Africa, the article says.
The class culminated with the students giving a presentation to the chancellor, Sheri Everts, who had been criticized by some students at the university for her response to an incident in which a banner promoting a white-supremacist group was displayed on the campus at the start of the semester. The presentation led the chancellor to realize that there were no students on the task force she had created to address “the lack of cultural diversity in the public art on campus,” the article says, and to invite some to join it. You can read more about the course in the full article in Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education here.
