Synecdoche

In the life of an academic, there are several more things that can be said to be certain. Among them the surprisingly difficult teaching philosophy statement, the concept of departmental service, solitary office hours, the vagaries of academic writing. And, like clockwork, the student evaluation.

In a world of increasing precision and carefully controlled experiments, the student evaluation is on its best days a blunt instrument. It is a tool meant to distill a semester of teaching down to its essential qualities, privileging, as it were, the concise over the precise, the opinion of the student over the intent of the professor, the fleeting, momentary conviction over the enduring understanding.¹ It is often the only (nominally) meaningful feedback we get from students. It is permanent, and its indelible judgment can weigh heavily, for better or worse, on the young academic’s future. Yet they cannot answer some very basic, very important questions about the students and classroom that produce them. Put another way, student evaluations fail by asking students to reflect without also asking them to self-reflect.

Student evaluations are on some level a tacit affirmation that student experience is at least as important as an instructor’s expertise or the actual process of learning in the classroom. With that in mind, there are two modes of self-reflection students should be, but are not asked to produce when filling out evaluations. In the first place, they are asked to reflect on their experience of their instructor —what did they like or not like about the instructor, about the class?— but never to reflect on why the instructor may have assigned a certain disliked task, emphasized a certain intricate point.² Neither, in the second (and more egregious) place, are students expected to reflect on their own role in the creation of their learning environment.

I would like to dwell on the latter of these two points. If students do not understand why the classroom is being run a certain way, or do not understand the meaning of a lesson or an assignment, the instructor is (generally) also partially to blame. Students deserve to be let in on the process of learning, at least at the level of course, class, and assignment goals and objectives. But ultimately what is lost in these situations is the possibility of a single more meaningful experience. When, on the other hand, we allow students to fail to understand that they too have roles to play in the creation and realization of their learning environments, we sacrifice something of much greater value: the opportunity to be co-creators in the classroom, the chance to bring students into the conversation as conscious collaborators in the experience of learning, and the responsibility to pass along the tools they they need to learn independently once they leave the classroom.

In the few years I have spent before a classroom, I have been on the receiving end of a few astonishingly negative evaluations from students that grossly misunderstand the course objectives,³ misread numeric scales (resulting in positive comments juxtaposed with negative numbers), blame me for departmental policy, judge me more than the class I ran, and critique how I chose to teach the material over whether I helped them to master it. Each of these reveals a powerful and problematic lack of self-reflection. To take such evaluations seriously, a number of other questions would have to be answered: To what extent did you feel invested in improving the quality of this course? Did you ever approach your instructor about your concerns? How well did you get along personally with your instructor? How would you describe the dynamics of the classroom? In what ways did you contribute to those dynamics? How often did you miss class? What do you think your daily responsibilities consisted of? How prepared did you feel for class on a daily basis? How have the most recent classes affected your perception of the course as a whole? The answer to each and every one of these questions would color any student evaluation, from the most positive to the most negative, not least because it would require to student to evaluate him or herself as well as the class and the instructor. We would be forced, then, to understand each one in its strikingly heterogeneous context.

As my graduate school department’s student evaluations stubbornly failed to address these concerns, I began to implement my own (unofficial) solution to what were seemingly intractable problems by designing my own mid-semester feedback forms. For the past several years, these brutally, breathtakingly honest moments of student self-reflection have been far and away the most useful and revealing snapshots of what works and does not work in my teaching. In keeping these evaluations fully anonymous —in the age of computers I no longer recognize anyone’s handwriting, and wouldn’t care to if I did— and by letting my students know how seriously I take their opinions (despite the low stakes of the evaluation itself), they are relieved of any “responsibility” to mince words. In permitting me to ask the questions I truly care about, and in allowing my students a productive outlet for the expression of honest classroom frustrations, these short forms have become the foundation of my reflective teaching practice.

As a way into a discussion of the broader usefulness of mid-semester feedback, permit me to comment on a selection of key quotations from a recent edition of The Chronicle:

More and more professors are using midterm student evaluations, experts say, and more and more colleges are strongly urging their faculty to collect student feedback midway through their courses. Stony Brook this year put in place a universitywide online system for collecting midcourse feedback. Professors and students are not required to use it, but university officials are hoping that both groups will see its benefits and use it to improve classrooms.

Growing use of midcourse feedback comes amid debate over how much emphasis colleges, departments, and instructors should place on student evaluations completed at the end of terms, and to what extent the information should be used to measure the quality of instructors.

—Brenda Medina, As Emphasis on Student Evaluations Grows, Professors Increasingly Seek Midcourse Feedback

While I am an enthusiastic proponent of mid-semester evaluations, I am profoundly reticent about giving administrators access to those evaluations, as well as the notion that a standardized mid-semester evaluation is the best solution.⁴ Though better than the blunt instruments normally used at the end of a course, the moment self-designed mid-semester evaluations become administratively mandated is the moment they lose the basis of their power and charm: anonymity and low stakes. As Medina notes,

Because midcourse evaluations carry lower stakes than those at the end of a course, faculty members can use them often to ask tougher questions. Sometimes, Ms. Davis said, end-of-semester questionnaires do not ask the right kinds of questions for giving professors the information they need to improve their teaching. Professors who use midcourse evaluations say they believe they get more-honest feedback from students in the middle of the term than they get at the end, in part because the professors can use midcourse evaluations to ask directed and open-ended questions.

By raising the stakes, university-mandated mid-semester evaluations would lose the essential quality that makes them so effective: the private dialogue between student and professor, in which both reflect on their roles in the classroom not as an end in itself, but as a means to a better endpoint.

At Stony Brook, the online form the university provides for midsemester evaluations includes two open-ended questions: What does the instructor do particularly well? And, what could the instructor do better?

This strikes me as a very limited set of questions. By focusing exclusively on the students’ perception of the instructor, the evaluation denies the opportunity for students to recognize themselves as agents of their own instruction. In an attempt to affirm the stake students have both in helping me to adjust my instructional practice, and them to adjust their involvement in the classroom, to work better for everyone, the mid-semester evaluation I use asks the following questions:

1. My expectations of this class were…
2. Is the class meeting these expectations? If not, please explain.
3. My experience of this course would be improved if I would…⁵
4. My experience of this course would be improved if the instructor would…
5. The most helpful aspect(s) of this course is/are…
6. The least helpful aspect(s) of this course is/are…
7. Please add any additional comments about the course or about the instructor that you wish to make:

If it is of administrative interest to collect the kind of information mid-semester evaluations reveal, the solution is of course to adapt final student evaluations to look more like mid-semester evaluations. And indeed, a few small adjustments and simple shifts in verb tense transforms this same mid-semester evaluation into a beginning-of-semester evaluation, and later into an end-of-semester evaluation. The result is a productive stop-motion animation of how student expectations of me and of themselves evolve over the course of a semester. One rarely finds adulatory pull-out quotes in these evaluations, but they are, in my opinion, the only ones that demonstrably improve my teaching practice.

Footnotes

1. It is fair to say, I think, that even the most thoughtful student cannot know the impact a course will have one, five, or ten years down the road. ↩
2. That many instructors would be unable to answer these questions themselves indicates a troubling lack of self-reflection on their part. ↩
3. Usually my own fault in part, but when student have listed “learning grammar” as the main objective of an advanced composition course, for example, I have looked elsewhere for the breakdown. ↩
4. While I do think that my mid-semester evaluation would be useful for instructors in any field, I am wary of the implication that mandating uniformity is a good idea. ↩
5. I added the word “would” at the end of this and the following question after a significant number of students in one semester used both as an opportunity to comment on the way I ran class, rather than using the former as an opportunity to reflect on their own preparation and engagement. ↩

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