Too often colleges rely largely, if not solely, on end-of-semester student course evaluations to determine whether a professor has been an effective teacher. But the problem doesn’t end there. Even peer evaluations, which many colleges use for promotion and tenure, are often haphazardly done, professors tell me. In short, not much attention is given to substantively evaluating how effective a faculty member is at teaching, or offering guidance and support to improve.
I spoke to a number of teaching experts to figure out how higher education ended up here. I hope you take a few minutes to read the article, but in the meantime here are a few takeaways:
Student course evaluations are easy and cheap. I heard this from almost everyone I talked to. Typically they are handled by a central office so departments can take a hands-off approach to running them.
Numbers give the appearance of objectivity. And they’re easier to use. If colleges switch to more qualitative metrics, like detailed narratives by colleagues and descriptive feedback from students, instructors and administrators would need to spend more time and attention determining someone’s effectiveness. And, if you’re divvying up merit raises, that’s easier to do when you’re dealing with numbers, not words, even if you believe those numbers to lack substance.
Faculty members don’t necessarily want to spend more time evaluating each other. Peer evaluation takes time to do well. It may involve ongoing conversations with your colleagues, a review of their course materials, and several visits to their classroom during the semester. And, of course, members of a department need to agree on what criteria to use, which can be fraught and time-consuming.
So is there a way forward? Yes. But you have to believe that putting in the time is worth it. Departments that have undergone reforms say that younger faculty members often end up being the greatest beneficiaries of this work, because they now have a clear road map to follow. And, of course, there is increased public pressure on colleges to show their commitment to student success, which, many argue, starts with effective teaching.
But as Lauren Barbeau, assistant director of learning and technology initiatives at the Georgia Institute of Technology, put it: Colleges often start with the wrong question. Instead of “How do we do a better job of evaluation teaching?” she says, they should first ask, “How do we define good teaching?”
Barbeau and her colleague, Claudia Cornejo Happel, an associate director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University at Daytona Beach, wrote a book inspired by their experiences with evaluation reform on a prior campus, which was driven by the consolidation of two institutions with different teaching cultures. That led to a lot of misunderstandings, they said, and confusion over how department chairs were supposed to evaluate their new colleagues. Their book, Critical Teaching Behaviors: Defining, Documenting, and Discussing Good Teaching, is designed to help colleges work through the kinds of questions the authors encountered.
“When we ask about measures of good teaching before we’ve defined what it is, we’re putting the cart before the horse,” Barbeau wrote to me in an email. “In the conversations we’ve been privy to, we’ve seen that participants are often — unwittingly — working with very different understandings of what it means to be an effective teacher. … Their definitions of good teaching may be more or less informed by evidence-based practices, conventions in their discipline, peer perspectives, and their own experiences. The result is a set of individual assumptions about what good teaching is that frequently go uncommunicated as stakeholders jump into conversations about how to evaluate teaching first.”
I followed up by phone with Barbeau and Cornejo Happel to learn more. They noted that many professors may agree on what good teaching includes but may have different approaches to getting there. Barbeau recalls a conversation with one faculty member who was being evaluated by a colleague. The colleague visited the faculty member’s classroom as she was leading small discussion groups and said, “Oh, I’ll come back on a day that you’re teaching.” The fact that the colleague didn’t recognize that this was a viable teaching strategy was a problem.
Acknowledging these differences is particularly important, says Cornejo Happel, when taking into consideration things like class size and type. Engagement in a 200-person course is going to look quite different than a 15-person course. “We need to define good teaching and advocate for more measures of good teaching instead of only focusing on student evaluations,” she said. “And for those measures to be effective, we need to have a common language to talk about teaching. … If I say I’m engaging my students, people know what I’m talking about and the people evaluating me know there is not just one way to engage students. There are multiple options to do so.”
What has your experience with the teaching-evaluation process been like? Whether you’re the instructor under the microscope, or the supervisor trying to figure out how to evaluate teaching across a department or college, we want to hear from you.
Many of the responses we’ve received so far have focused on student course evaluations. We’d be particularly interested to hear about your experience with the entire evaluation process around your teaching, to include peer evaluation and any other measures that count. You can fill out this Google form or write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com
Further resources on evaluations
Interested in joining a new coalition around revamping teaching evaluations? This announcement by the Bay View Alliance offers details and contact information.
Want to learn how other institutions have rethought measurements of teaching quality?
Here are some examples:
*Appalachian State University created the Teaching Quality Framework.
*Boise State University created the Framework for Assessing Teaching Effectiveness.
*Indiana University developed the Identifying Pathways for Excellence in Teaching.
*The University of Kansas created the Benchmarks for Teaching Effectiveness.
*The University of Oregon’s website Revising Teaching Evaluations provides links to the university’s revisions to student course evaluations, self-reflection statements, and peer evaluation.
Can students read?
This article in Slate, by Adam Kotsko, an assistant professor in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, in Illinois, has been getting a lot of attention. It focuses on what he sees as students’ declining ability to read at length and comprehend what they read.
Kotsko writes: “For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation — sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument — skills I used to be able to take for granted.”
While digital distraction and learning loss have received a lot of attention, Kotsko argues, less discussed are changes to K-12 pedagogy that he believes stunted students’ reading skills.
Are you seeing this problem among your students? If so, how have you responded? Do you assign less reading? Break down assignments into smaller steps? Provide the kinds of instruction that you would have expected students to already know? Write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com. I want to hear about your experiences.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com
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— Beth
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