Thursday, August 18, 2011

Reading student evaluations

How we read and respond to student evaluations of our teaching is an interesting question?
Here are a few preliminary thoughts on what we should and should not do.
We should
  • read them all very carefully
  • be willing to change how and what we teach
  • take particular notice of comments (both positive and negative) that are repeated e.g., if 30 per cent of students say the textbook is terrible then we need to change it...
  • realise that sometimes students comments may actually be more about them and their expectations than about your teaching
We should not
  • make it our goal to keep everyone happy. the goal is to teach not to be popular.
  • give particular credence to comments of just one or two students.
  • take the comments (both positive and negative) too personally.
Any other thoughts?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Elastic interactions and complex patterns in binary systems

One of the many beauties of condensed matter physics is that it can reveal and illuminate how two systems or phenomena that at first appear ...