Evaluation of Your Teaching

A Few General Thoughts about Evaluations

It will likely be useful evaluate your teaching in several ways, including course evaluation forms, responses to questions you ask in class or lab, and student answers on quizzes and exams.
It can be useful to design your own student evaluations. Write your own questions for students to answer—ask things that are specific to your course, to concerns you have about the course, or to things you are considering changes for future courses.  Make sure the questions are designed to help your students adequately evaluate the course, your teaching, and how well you achieved your teaching goals.

In general, student evaluations can be very useful, if painful to read.  They are often painful because students may tie their emotions into their responses, and students who have complaints may offer harsh comments.  Further, it is hard not to take their words personally.  However, evaluations can offer great advice for how to improve your teaching.  Here are some tips for reading student evaluations:

1. Start in a good mood

2. Separate general trends from outliers and pay attention to the general trends.

It is probably good to take the substance of what students say to heart.  That said, sometimes figuring out the substance in the comments can be difficult.  For instance, sometimes I have felt like I need to read between the lines students write, or to take their words with a grain of salt.  Sometimes I have felt like one or two students felt personally slighted for not getting the grade they wanted, so wrote harsh words on the evaluations.  On the other hand, sometimes students have written positive comments even if they did not understand the material or do well in the class.  When students admit to “not understanding the material”, although they place the blame on themselves, to me this means I did not do my job well enough for that student. 

3. Give more attention to comments than numbers (on evaluations where students rate aspects of the course from 1-5—these questions are often less useful).

4. Classify comments into categories (addressing things within your control—assignments, your responses to student work, etc. vs. things not in your control—time of day, department-mandated course requirements, etc).  In addition, map comments relative to your course goals (do students’ comments suggest that you did the things you set out to do?)

5. Go for a walk (or ice cream, or coffee) afterwards and don't dwell on the negative comments too much. Once you've had some time (days or weeks) to get distance from the comments, give them an objective re-thinking and write a reminder for yourself about any changes that you will want to make the next time you teach this course.

For me, quizzes are also good evaluations of how I am doing as teacher—through grading, I can see directly how well students understand the material, or correct any widely-held misconceptions about the material (which I do at the beginning of the subsequent class). 
Videotaping yourself while teaching can also be helpful, because it enables people to see the ways in which their own (and their students’) perceptions of their teaching match what they see and hear in the video. 

by Tracy S. Feldman and Christine Fleet

Links:

• Tips for designing a course evaluation form
• Sample course evaluation form
• Sample peer/faculty mentor evaluation form
• Videotape evaluation form

Back to Teaching Certificate Home