Revamp Your College’s General-Education Program
A thorough, well-planned gen-ed program is essential to preparing today’s students for an increasingly complex world. Get this special report for key insights into what you need to know before rethinking your college’s core courses.
Moment of Change
For many professors, teaching is the most challenging — and rewarding — part of the job. The Chronicle asked a group of professors to tell us about a moment that changed how they approach the classroom. Here’s what they told us.
Was there a moment like that in your own career that you’d like to share? We’re collecting them here, and may include them in a future newsletter.
The Debate Over Course Evaluations
If you want to start a fight among academics, just find people on the opposite sides of the fence on student course evaluations and let them go at it. A recent opinion essay got many of our readers in a lather, with blunt words, pro and con. The author, a professor emerita at Michigan State University, complained that the evaluations hurt both instructors and students. In short, they give students unearned power over their teachers, which encourages students to be lazy and disengaged.
On our Facebook page, some readers praised the piece and knocked evaluations for, as one person put it, encouraging students to be “cowardly back-stabbers. With no communication skills.”
“You have an issue?” wrote this commenter. “Resolve it by talking, not waiting till the end of the semester in silence to write something that really will make no damn difference.”
That prompted a critique. “The notion that student evals are *only* designed to address problems seems to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of what this tool allows,” another reader wrote. “Yes, the evals give students an opportunity to register complaints about things they didn’t like in a course, but they also allow them to weigh in on activities they found engaging or misguided, rewarding or rote, etc. They can give us incredibly valuable insight into our teaching methods and practices, whether we accept their views or not.”
The debate goes back and forth through dozens of comments.
Pro: Evaluations give otherwise powerless students the opportunity to voice their opinions about the quality of instruction, and they give administrators a sense of how well their faculty members connect with students.
Con: Some colleges use these evaluations like a blunt instrument: tying reviews to raises and promotions, while abdicating their responsibility to professionally evaluate the effectiveness of faculty teaching. The evaluation often comes too late in the process to provide instructors with meaningful feedback, and research has shown that evaluations are subject to gender bias and other forms of prejudice.
It’s also clear that many people are searching for alternatives. So, here’s one. In June our colleague Beckie Supiano wrote about how the University of Southern California ditched the traditional evaluation and replaced it with one that asks students more-nuanced questions about their learning experiences. And at the end of her story you can find resources on other models for evaluating teaching and on training students to give better feedback.
Unusual STEM Assignments
A few weeks ago, we told you about a professor’s unusual assignment and asked you to give examples of your own. Several readers in STEM disciplines emailed us to share what they do.
Jan Reichard-Brown, an associate professor of biology at Susquehanna University, sometimes assigns her students to create a public-health brochure about parasites. It “requires interdisciplinary thinking and synthesis of the material,” she wrote.
And two of you have used the conventions of magazine writing to help students translate complex scientific concepts for a general audience.
David C. Stone, an associate professor of analytical chemistry and chemistry education at the University of Toronto, has asked students to write about a research article from a scholarly journal, but to do so in the style of a general-interest magazine. A few students produced mini-magazines, and one even featured an editorial and advertising. The exercise, he wrote, develops students’ ability to communicate complex subjects in a way the public can understand. Stone also found that the assignment prompts students to put concepts in their own words instead of simply copying jargon, which allows him to see more clearly whether they understand a subject’s underlying concepts.
Along the same lines, Kaitlin Stack Whitney, a visiting assistant professor and environmental-studies scholar at the Rochester Institute of Technology, has her students make zines, or homemade publications featuring both text and images. The informality and visual nature of the form, she thinks, help motivate students to create deeply researched and creative products.
For example, a team of students made a zine last year about algae in Lake Ontario, for which they read papers about the algae, collected water samples from the lake, and took microscopy images. “They made their research visible,” Stack Whitney wrote.
Part of the value of the assignment, she wrote, is that “explaining to others is the best way to demonstrate synthesis.”
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at dan.berrett@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive your own copy, you can sign up here.
—Beth and Dan
