Teaching

Welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week:

• Beckie explains one professor’s strategy for reading student course evaluations.
• Dan shares readers’ responses on special study periods.
• We point you toward two recent Twitter threads about teaching and learning.
• We pass along a reader’s story of an experience that changed her teaching.

Skipping to the Good Parts

Most of what students write in Joshua S. Goodman’s course evaluations is positive. Even so, Goodman, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, found that “the one harsh comment” in each batch would stick with him. That negative comment wouldn’t just hurt his feelings: It made him less receptive to the good suggestions that students made.

So Goodman came up with a system for getting student feedback into a more useful format. He described the method in a recent Twitter thread. “I no longer read my teaching evaluations,” it begins. Instead, Goodman has his assistant divide students’ comments into three categories: positive, constructive criticism, and unconstructive criticism.

His assistant then creates a document containing verbatim quotes of positive comments and a summary of the constructive criticism. The negative comments are left out of the document entirely.

“I tried this system for the first time last year,” Goodman tweeted, “and the result was a much more positive experience, one that allowed me to enjoy the fruits of my labor and to look forward to the course refinement process. It was the best I’ve felt about teaching in years.”

Very few of the comments he gets, Goodman said in an interview, are strictly negative. But there’s just no benefit in reading them. Screening out such feedback, he said, could be even more valuable for professors from the groups that research suggests bear the brunt of needlessly personal comments: women and minorities.

For Goodman, the big benefit of his approach is how his assistant characterizes the constructive criticism. He gave me an example, reading a student comment he pulled up at random. “Interactions with Professor Goodman,” it said, “are difficult outside of class. Make office hours more accessible, increase frequency.” The full comment, Goodman said, made him wonder about what he had done that bothered the anonymous student. His assistant’s distillation, Goodman explained, would convey only the actionable advice: In this case, something like “have more office hours.” That, he said, “removes the emotional intensity.”

Goodman’s thread sparked discussion on Twitter, mostly, it seems, among professors. Some wrote that they took a similar approach, or liked the idea and might try it in the future.

Others were more skeptical. Some fellow economists, Goodman said, disliked the idea that he’d throw away any information. His response? An insight of psychology and behavioral economics is that people often give outsize attention to the part of feedback that’s negative. Fixating on those comments, he said, could lead him to alter the course for the worse.

A smaller group of replies suggested that Goodman was being too sensitive. But he said he wasn’t suggesting that everyone should handle feedback this way, but merely passing along something that’s worked for him. And it seems to have resonated.

Some professors who replied to the tweet expressed surprise that Goodman has an assistant, or mentioned not having one themselves. There are other people a professor could turn to for help organizing feedback, Goodman said. In one of his tweets, he suggested trading evaluations with a colleague or asking a partner or spouse to wade through them.

And there’s another resource out there – for anyone who happens to teach at Duke University. Matthew Rascoff, the associate vice provost for digital education and innovation, who helps improve teaching and learning efforts at Duke, tweeted this reply: “I love this so much I am going to just say right here: for any @DukeU who wants a service like this, @DukeLearning will do it for you. Reach out if interested.”

Rascoff hadn’t gotten any takers yet, he said, but the offer stands.

Have you changed the way you get feedback from your students? If so, what did you learn? Tell me about it at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and it may appear in a future newsletter.

**A Message from the Chronicle: Reforming Gen Ed Issue Brief

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.**

One Period, Many Names

We recently passed along a request from a fellow reader who wondered, Do any campuses have dedicated “tutoring” or “study” hours? These would be blocks of time when no classes are held so that students could seek out help. Apparently, several colleges do this.

The names of these dedicated periods vary. Some campuses of Pennsylvania State University, for example, have “common hour.” That’s also the name of what the University of Baltimore offers four days a week, writes John Chapin, director of academic-success programs there. The time is intended to give freshmen the opportunity to do things like visit the library or writing center, get tutoring, study, or attend office hours. And, Chapin writes, people at the institution think common hour is partly why retention of freshmen increased nine percentage points, to 77 percent, between 2017 and 2018.

Texas Wesleyan University, in Fort Worth, calls its twice-weekly session “free period,” when campuswide events and meetings of student organizations, faculty committees, and student-faculty sessions can take place. “I am not sure how to measure whether it contributes to retention,” wrote Brenda Taylor Matthews, a professor of American history. West Point has started setting aside 10 Wednesdays a semester as “study days.” And Fort Lewis College, in Durango, Colo., has “college hour” twice a month, which is typically used for committee meetings and student events.

Several readers reported that they remembered their campuses having these periods in the past. Examples included Bridgewater State, DePauw, and Emory Universities, the University of Pennsylvania, and Wellesley College. Long Beach City College, which is another such example, used one of the more striking names for theirs: “dead hour.”

2 Good Questions on Twitter

A couple of recent Twitter discussions caught our eye. In each case, a professor posed a question about teaching and learning:

• Claire Major, a professor of educational leadership, policy, and technology studies at the University of Alabama, asked: “College teachers, how did you learn how to teach?” One response: “Thrown in pool, tried not to drown.” Check out the rest of the replies here.
• Justin Wolfers, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, asked: Was there a memorable college course you use in “ways that you never anticipated at the time?” Read his tweet and the replies here.

Letting Students’ Voices Dominate

We asked our readers to tell us about an experience that changed the way they teach. Leila Ansari Ricci, an associate professor of special education and counseling at California State University at Los Angeles, shared this story:

As I have evolved in my teaching, I hate to hear myself talk. Early in my career, I thought lectures overflowing with my expert knowledge were what students needed (and what I should do to establish myself as deserving of my tenure-track position). Yet even before I had fully digested the research on the benefits of active learning, I knew something was amiss with my assumption that my expertise needed to be constantly on display in the classroom.

One day when I had literally lost my voice due to laryngitis, I decided to let students’ voices dominate my classroom rather than my own. When a student told me that day how much she enjoyed and learned from the class activities, I knew I would never again feel the same about lecturing or my voice dominating my courses. I began including an “activities” section in my syllabi. Where before I would only outline dates, topics, and readings, I now plan activities to engage students and facilitate their ability to make meaning of course content. I look for impactful ways to engage students’ emotions.

For example, in my course in English Language Arts instruction for special education teaching credential candidates, I want students to understand the influence of early literacy experiences on children. Instead of PowerPoint slides “telling” students about these ideas, I ask them to write anonymously about their own early literacy experiences (and positive and negative experiences with adults on their literacy journey).

My students are surprised when I tell them to crumple their papers. We next have a “snowball fight” as students toss crumpled papers around the classroom and then walk around collecting snowballs. We repeat this a few times, giving students a much needed physical break, as they read several of their classmates’ literacy experiences. When we gather to review the activity and stories shared in the snowballs, students are abuzz in their reactions to similarities and differences in their peers’ experiences, and how these will mimic those of their future K-12 students.

Because of the anonymity of this activity, the shared stories are potent, authentic, and often heart tugging. The activity helps these future teachers realize their impact on students as they learn to read, the fundamental skill underlying so much of children’s access to learning and knowledge. This is just one small but meaningful activity. And one in which students’ voices – not mine – dominate my classroom.

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or steve.johnson@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive your own copy, you can sign up here.

— Beckie and Dan