Most student rating instruments include a question related to the feedback provided by the instructor. It may ask whether it was constructive, actionable, delivered in a timely manner, or some combination of these characteristics. Most teachers are conscientious about giving students feedback. Because they devote
“Good Teaching Is Like Good Sex,” proclaims the article title. Don’t stop reading just yet. If you do, you’ll miss a totally serious, insightful, actually downright amazing account of a teaching experience with profound effect.
Classroom observation instruments are not used all that regularly in higher education, but when they are, the focus tends to be on high-level abstractions (“The teacher was organized.”) or aggregated behaviors (“The teacher treated students with respect.”). Items like these are appropriate, but they do
The RateMyProfessor (RMP) site has been around now for more than a decade. As of 2013, it contained 14 million entries for more than 1.3 million professors from 7,000 schools. “Its express purpose is to serve as a resource for other users in their decision-making,
As a tenured full professor, I’m mostly scheduled for upper division and graduate courses. However, last year I taught two classes of traditional aged, first-year students. It was a good learning experience and provided me with new insights about beginning college students.
“Even measures with perfect validity can be rendered useless if they are interpreted incorrectly, and anecdotal evidence suggests that teaching evaluations are frequently the subject of unwarranted interpretations based on assumed levels of precision that they do not possess.” (p. 641) And now there’s some
Individual courses and degree programs give us the opportunity to move students along a developmental continuum. Content complexity grows across course sequences, as does student understanding of it. But are students growing as learners in the same way? Are we designing learning experiences so that
Nothing works quite as well as a good question when it comes to getting the intellectual muscles moving. Given the daily demands of most academic positions, there’s not much time that can be devoted to reflection about teaching. But good questions are useful because they
Stephen Brookfield is out with a third edition of The Skillful Teacher. Only a handful of books on teaching make it past the first edition so to be out with a third says something about the caliber of this publication. He notes in the preface
Occasionally I read old issues of the newsletter, usually looking for something I vaguely remember. Sometimes I find it and other times I don’t, but pretty much always I stumble across something that I’ve completely forgotten that I wish I’d remembered. Case in point…
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