Get Better Teaching Evaluations by Changing Your Attitude
In science, that which is measured is paid attention to. As a result, your course will benefit if it has an end in mind, improving the end-of-term student evaluations of your course. The super-secret pathway to getting great teaching evaluations is surprisingly simple. As it turns out, transforming your classroom to focus on student learning rather than on your teaching performance has the side effect of improving your course evaluations too.
Let’s start with what doesn’t work. A quick Internet search on improving your class will yield a long list of things virtually guaranteed to improve your course evaluations: having students call you by your first name, wearing casual clothes, telling jokes and stories of sex and violence from the field, starting every class blaring popular music, and, the most universal recommendation, bringing donuts to class on evaluation day. These ideas are often accompanied by notions that students want a professor who is cool, doesn’t make them work very hard, and gives everyone good grades. All of these ideas have the same thing in common: They don’t work. Really.
You might not know this, but there are entire University Departments of brilliant scholars who study higher education and have been doing so for many years. They’ve developed an entire body of literature on college classes and they have studied the course evaluation issue from every possible angle and analyzed every imaginable piece of data. What they’ve learned might simultaneously terrify you and make you feel better.
When students read the questions on one of the many course evaluation forms available to colleges—and some of these forms are quite long—students reinterpret all of the items to be one of just two possible questions.
ONE: Did the professor want to help me learn?
TWO: Did the professor follow an organized plan?
That’s it. All those questions so laboriously worded about the extent to which the professor is creating respectful learning environments, being responsive to student questions, holding office hours, having detailed knowledge of the class content, and returning graded work on time need to be thrown completely out the window. Students simply reword them in their own mind into just two.
I view this as a wildly fortunate opportunity because both of these ideas are actionable. In other words, there are specific, concrete things you can do to enhance students’ answers to these questions when they apply them to you and your class.
The reason that focusing on these two questions works so well is what underlies them. At the end of a 15-week course with you, where students spend nearly 45 hours with you—and perhaps allocate even substantially more time cumulatively engaging with astronomy by reading, doing homework, completing assigned laboratory exercise and astronomical observation tasks, and preparing for exams—most students really want one thing: to be different as a result of this extended experience.
As a quick aside to the genuine skeptic who pauses and says, “Uh, wait a minute, some of my students just don’t want to learn science. What about them?” You’re absolutely right. I’ll readily concede that some students don’t want to learn science. In fact, I’m willing to go out on a limb here and suggest that nearly all of your students fall into this category. I mean, in most introductory science survey classes, you have few science majors. In fact, you could have no science majoring students at all. Many of these students have already decided years ago that they aren’t “science people” and are only taking your course because they needed a liberal arts, general education course to fulfill a science course elective requirement. I agree. This is who is in your class.
However, I’d beg you to consider, if even for only a moment, a radically different perspective. A single change in perspective might be all you need to dramatically transform your course from an experience to be endured by students to one that is life-long transformative for students. The perspective is this:
What if it was your job as the professor to help students love science?
Adopting this alternate perspective dramatically changes the astronomy course as something done TO students into something done FOR students. Let’s take a quick reality check here: It’s not hard to teach people about science who already love science. In fact, it might be argued that a professor would have to intentionally try to be unsuccessful at teaching students who already love science. I contend that nearly anyone could tackle that simple task of teaching those who already think science is cool. Instead, what I want you to do is to be highly successful at teaching students who enter your classroom already convinced they don’t love science. If you organize your class for these hard-to-reach students, nearly everyone wins—even those students who enrolled in your class correctly thinking science is awesome.
Suggested Citation: Slater, T. F. (2018, August). Get better teaching evaluations by changing your attitude. Society of College Science Teachers Blog, 4(1), https://www.scst.org/blog