The Skillful Teacher

Improving Your Evaluations
In contrast to the reams of advice available in textbooks concern-
ing how to improve instruction, there is relatively little attention
given to how you might improve the way you give your evaluations.
Yet, from the student’s point of view, your evaluations represent a
major learning moment, one that can be confusing or demoralizing,
clarifying or inspirational. Consequently, trying to improve how she
gives evaluations should represent a major professional development
task for any committed teacher. Two possible ways this task might
be undertaken suggest themselves. First, teachers can reflect on their
own experience of being on the receiving end of evaluations and
try to identify what it was about the experience that was either
helpful or demoralizing. They can then try to build some of these
features into their own practice. Second, they can ask their students
to comment on which evaluative behaviors and approaches were
most helpful to them and then do their best to make sure these are
contained in the evaluations they give to students.
For a teacher to experience being evaluated provides an invalu-
able window into the visceral, emotionally charged reactions this
process induces in learners. To receive another’s evaluations of your
work is a powerful, often humbling, and always enlightening expe-
rience. If those who regularly give evaluations of others’ efforts
receive regular evaluations of their own endeavors, they can hardly
escape the visceral significance of such scrutiny. Being on the
receiving end of an evaluation is an excellent way to sensitize your-
self to those aspects of evaluation that affirm and illuminate, and
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KILLFUL
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EACHER
those that demean and confuse. For example, as a writer who regu-
larly submits his work to academic journals and conference panels
as part of a blind review process, I am subject to frequent critiques.
My manuscripts are criticized for their unnecessarily obscure lan-
guage, their lack of practicality, their tendency to repetition, and
their political tone (or sometimes for their lack of political analy-
sis). When I first receive these criticisms, I usually act emotionally
to them. Often, my first impulse is to fire off an angry e-mail broad-
side haranguing the editors for their lack of judgment in choosing
such obviously uninformed reviewers to comment on my work.
Even though, rationally, I know I am being unfair and reacting
instinctively and defensively, the strength of my reaction has not
diminished much with time.
Gradually, however, I settle down and give the reviews a second,
third, and fourth reading, and it is then that I start to make some
judgments about the helpfulness of these evaluations. If a review of
my manuscript is wholly negative and overlaid with a tone of per-
sonal insult, then it loses credibility for me. For example, if a reviewer
called one of my books vacuous nonsense, said it had no content,
contained nothing specific to teachers, and was replete with hollow
chapter and section titles, it would obviously be hard for me to read
this. But if the reviewer supported these criticisms by making a strong
case that critical reflection and critical thinking were irrevocably dis-
ciplinary based processes that could not be spoken of as generic men-
tal processes in the way that I had, then I would be open to learning
from them. However, if the insightful challenge of this critique was
sabotaged by comments such as that students in teacher training
courses were “not the brightest people around” and that the “drivel”
my book represented would leave them more confused than ever,
then the credibility of the critique would be damaged in my eyes. A
review that pointed out my conceptual confusion but omitted the
personal tone would be one I would take far more seriously.
Being aware of my own reactions to negative evaluations reminds
me to scrutinize the evaluations I give to students for any derogatory
personal comments I might unwittingly be making, and to make sure
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I acknowledge that even though their efforts might be misguided, at
least they tried to do their best. If I pay more attention to reviews of
my own work that show some evenhanded recognition of my efforts,
then I reason that students will have the same reaction. Again, if I
receive an evaluation that makes blanket criticisms (for example that
my work is drivel or vacuous nonsense), but that gives no specific
examples of where my efforts are in error and could be improved,
then I am left with no fruitful directions to pursue. Knowing that
generalized criticisms do little other than frustrate or demoralize me
helps me to remember to focus on specific errors when I am evalu-
ating my own students’ work, to suggest items that they can work on
in the future, and to give students the chance to react to my criti-
cisms by seeking further clarification of any ambiguities.
A second option to improve your evaluative skills is to ask stu-
dents to evaluate the evaluations you give them. This sometimes
happens as part of end-of-course student surveys of teaching. Such
surveys assess a variety of instructional activities including the eval-
uative behaviors of the teacher. The problem with many of these
end-of-semester student opinion forms is that students fill them in
at the last class meeting as summative course evaluations, giving the
teacher no opportunity to work at improving her evaluative skills as
they apply to those students who completed the forms. Sometimes
information about your evaluative behaviors will be offered through-
out the semester on the CIQ form without any need for prompting
by you, particularly if you have returned marked assignments in class
that day. At other times it may be necessary to add an item to the
CIQ focusing only on how you give evaluations. You can also ask
students individually to tell you what they found most helpful in your
evaluations, or you can conduct a conversation about this in groups.
My own preference is always for students’ comments to be made
anonymously, since this increases the likelihood that such comments
will be honest expressions of opinion. The characteristics of helpful
evaluations specified earlier in this chapter have come, in large mea-
sure, from anonymous students’ comments to me about the aspects
of my evaluations that they particularly appreciated.
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11
S
ince the first edition of this book appeared, several profound
changes have occurred in higher education. Its clientele has
broadened to include students from a wide range of ethnic and
racial diversity, there has been an enormous growth in proprietary
higher education (the University of Phoenix being the most promi-
nent example), and the need to do more with less (as budgets are
continually shorn while student numbers are expected to grow)
means faculty are under increasing and unending stress. For most
college teachers, however, I would imagine that the biggest change
in their lives has been the requirement for them to integrate some
measure of online teaching into their practice. Many colleges now
offer whole degrees online, and even those faculty who still teach
primarily face to face have to take account of students’ desire to
have course resources posted on the web, syllabuses and course
announcements distributed to them electronically, and some oppor-
tunity provided for them to communicate with each other online
about course activities. So many colleges have purchased WebCT
or Blackboard programs that course registration and grade posting
is conducted electronically for a majority of students. These days no
college teacher can avoid teaching in a hybrid manner, combining
electronic and face-to-face communication. The only question
remaining is the degree to which electronic communication is inte-
grated into course activities.