Do you have a teaching evaluation that is seared into your memory? Perhaps it was one that was mean-spirited and unsparing in its criticism. Or it may have been directed towards you personally, and had absolutely nothing to do with your teaching.
If you’ve been a professor for any amount of time, you have undoubtedly come across a teaching evaluation from a student that stung a little bit. It could seem like course evals are a bit in the genre of Yelp or TripAdvisor reviews, where only the truly adoring or the truly disgruntled will feel compelled to write anonymous comments.
In this 12th episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I’m going to be discussing student evaluations of teaching, which are also referred to as teaching or course evaluations. I’ll be offering 7 tips for how to approach and navigate such evaluations, especially for women of color faculty.
How Would You Rate “Rate My Professors”?
If you’ve watched the Netflix comedy/drama series called The Chair starring Sandra Oh, you probably remember Joan (played by Holland Taylor) who has several scenes involving her teaching evaluations. Some of my favorites included Joan burning her course evals in the trash can and her discovery of the Rate My Professors website.
You’ve got to hand it to Joan for enlisting the help of the department’s IT administrator to try and track down the anonymous poster. In a way, Joan did what many of us would like to do at times when reading our own teaching evaluations: respond.
Now, most faculty know not to take the ratings and comments on websites like Rate My Professors seriously. I mean, this is a website where up until 5 years ago, students would indicate how attractive or “hot” they thought their professors were by giving them chili peppers.
When Course Evaluations Factor Into Promotion Cases
As you are probably aware, the teaching evaluations that often do matter are the ones that are administered by your institution. For professors on the tenure track, these assessments are compiled and then integrated into your tenure portfolio or tenure dossier.
And for adjunct faculty or non-tenure track faculty, teaching evaluations are also used in critical decisions on whether or not to renew contracts.
In all of these cases, course evals could play a deciding factor in tenure, promotion, or contract renewals. And reviews from a public website such as Rate My Professors could even be viewed by hiring committees, although they really shouldn’t be taken into consideration.
It’s no wonder that opening up your evals from last semester can be a nerve-wracking experience for you.
In my first years of teaching at an R1 state university, instructors were expected to administer course evaluations on the last day of instruction. The evals came in the form of a scantron sheet. It had a series of questions about the course and the instructor that students were expected to fill out.
At the end of the form there was a blank section for any written comments that the students may have about the instructor.
The data from all of these evaluations was then averaged into a single number, with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest in terms of performance. Any comments from the forms would be collated and then get integrated into the final report which was collected by the Academic Personnel office.
Mostly, students filled out the scantron portion and wrote minimal comments.
Of all the evals that I’ve received over the years, there’s one that I remember crystal clear:
She wears nice jewelry and apparel.
That was it. That was the comment! It was if they were reviewing an Ann Taylor store! And this was for the official university course evaluation, which would have been incorporated into my mid-career review.
At my second job, the university implemented online course evaluations that had to be submitted by students during the final week of instruction.
While I did not receive any scathing reviews, the issue that I encountered was a general lack of participation in the evaluation process. In some courses, less than a third of students even filled out the evaluations.
I don’t really blame the students in this situation, since they were given a relatively small window of time to fill out the forms during the final week of classes. This would have been a week on the quarter system, when they were also preparing for exams, papers, and presentations. So unless they had very strong opinions about a class and an instructor, what incentive would they have had to fill out these forms?
Some professors build in that incentive or a requirement in order to get students to fill out course evaluations. One professor that I knew required students to provide a confirmation screen shot of the completed review in order to take the final exam. I never went so far as to do that, but I can see the logic behind that strategy.
Now I don’t have to tell you that there is gendered and racialized bias that appear in these student assessments of teaching. As a woman of color professor, you probably don’t need to see the extensive research on this because you already know this from first-hand experience.
But if you would like to check out some fairly recent commentary on the topic, then I do provide several links in this episode’s transcript. Some of those links include:
•an opinion piece by David Delgado Shorter on how “Teaching Evaluations are Racist, Sexist, and Often Useless”
•the American Sociological Association’s formal statement on how student evaluations of teaching are problematic and how institutions should consider different methods of evaluating teaching.
•“Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews” on the Rate My Professors website by Ben Schmidt. This is an interactive website where you can type in keywords and see how they correlate across disciplines and gender.
•An article titled ”Exploring Bias in Student Evaluations: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity” by Kerry Chávez and Kristina M.W. Mitchell in the journal Political Science & Politics.
So, what do you do if you are working at a university that still weighs the standardized student evaluation of teaching heavily into your tenure or promotion case?
7 Tips for Approaching Your Teaching Evaluations with a Different Mindset
1. Know that there are some institutions out there that are either ditching these evaluations entirely or moving towards different, more holistic models of evaluations of teaching. Perhaps this is information that you can share with your chair or dean.
2. Even though it may be difficult to dismiss or ignore negative comments that you receive, try your best to reflect on and remember the positive ones. There are probably many more of those!
3. Consider doing informal mid-term evaluations, if you are not already doing so. Check in with your students at the mid-point and ask for feedback. That way, if there are issues in the course, you can address them and build on the feedback.
4. For certain promotions or for those of you at a teaching-intensive institution, peer evaluations are required. Have a conversation with your chair early on about how many of these teaching observations are expected and which colleagues may be able to write for you. Based on your syllabus, you may also want to select certain days for observations of your teaching. In this case, some advance planning is advised.
5. Consider doing your own kind of evaluation. After becoming really frustrated with a lack of student responses, I started to ask my students to reflect on their main takeaways for the course. This was structured as a final reflection assignment. Students would have to post their takeaways on the online discussion board, which was visible to all registered students in the class. In the end, I found this was much more rewarding and revealing, and it directed the focus to what the students learned in the class during the term. I created a PDF of these reflections, anonymized the student names, and used it as an addendum to my numeric teaching evaluations.
6. Save any positive feedback from students who may write to you after they finish your course or after they graduate. You can utilize some of this feedback in a teaching philosophy statement or a tenure self-statement.
7. After the course is finished and grades are submitted, reflect on what went well for you and what areas you’d like to improve on. As a teacher, how are you growing? This last tip shifts the evaluation perspective from one that is externally based to one that is internal.
So these are just a few ideas. I know there are likely many other suggestions and tips out there. Feel free to let me know if there is something that has worked for you in terms of approaching your own teaching evaluations.
On a last note, I did want to let you know that I’m very excited to be starting up a new peer-support group with Dr. Jodie Mader for former professors who have left higher ed and who are in the midst of their career pivots. We’re calling this group the Compassionate Cohort: Navigating the Post-Academic Wilderness in Community, and we’ll have our very first meeting on Friday, January 26 at 1pm Eastern. If you’re interested in joining this group or if you’d like to learn more, feel free to send me an e-mail at Katherine at RisewithClarity.com.
That’s it for today. Thanks so much.
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Additional Resources
Stroebe, Wolfgang. 2020. “Student Evaluations of Teaching Encourages Poor Teaching and Contributes to Grade Inflation: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis.” Basic and Applied Psychology Vol 42 No. 4, 276-294.
Articles
“The Skinny on Teaching Evals and Bias” by Colleen Flaherty in Inside Higher Ed.
“Teaching Evals: Bias and Tenure” by Colleen Flaherty in Inside Higher Ed.
Podcasts
“Teaching While Women of Color: Part I” featuring Mariana Alarcon, Elizabeth Alexander, Aurora Masum-Javed, and Renia White on the PhDivas Podcast, hosted by Christine “Xine” Yao.
“Teaching While Women of Color: Part II” featuring Mariana Alarcon, Elizabeth Alexander, Aurora Masum-Javed, and Renia White on the PhDivas Podcast, hosted by Christine “Xine” Yao.
“The Research on Course Evaluations” featuring Betsy Barre on Teaching in Higher Ed, hosted by Bonni Stachowiak.