Reflection on Teaching Evaluations
I wanted to receive feedback from students about their experience of the class, because this was my first experience teaching at the university level. To gain in-depth feedback, I asked extra questions on the student evaluations. I thought that it would be helpful to me to have specifics about what elements of the process were helpful and which were not helpful, as well as areas in which I could improve upon my teaching technique.
My teaching practicum class emphasized that activities during each class were essential to student outcomes. I was skeptical about the insistence on including so many activities. My undergraduate educational experience was based solely in lecture and class discussion. The only time that activity was a part of the learning process was during lab. The purpose of the lab was to learn specific techniques, such as chemical distillation, staining histological slides or administering injections. These kinds of skills were learned because we would use them during our future career. In contrast, our teaching practicum insisted that class activities be used to assist students in learning abstract concepts. I asked questions, which focused on the utility of class activities to learn from students which components they thought were most helpful to the learning process.
For the mid-semester evaluation, I asked six open-ended questions. These questions asked about the most favorite and least favorite activities and how they would like to spend class time (lecture, discussion or activities). From these questions, I found that some people learn best from lecture, some from activities and some from discussion. I tried to identify which activities were most helpful, and which I should eliminate. To my chagrin, I found that the situation was much more complex than simply keeping and eliminating activities. I tried to analyze the activities by tallying how many times students mentioned that a particular activity was helpful or unhelpful. This analysis was not useful for identifying problematic activities, because for every activity that a group of students found useless or distracting an equivalent number of students found them helpful. In a like manner, equal numbers of students endorsed the use of lecture, activities and discussion. From this information and research in the literature, I decided to design my classes using all three modes of instructional delivery, because different people find different modes helpful to their learning. I also instruct the class at the beginning of each semester about individual differences in learning preferences. I let them know that there will be some aspects of the class that they enjoy and some aspects that they don’t, but their preferences for lecture, discussion or activities are probably the opposite of the preferences of another student, and I try to provide something for everyone. You will notice that this is a prominent feature in my Teaching Competencies Statement.
Over all, my course ratings are good and I like to progress in my teaching skills. One area that I focused upon was the presentation of instruction. Most students enjoyed class discussion and found that it helped them to understand the material better, but a few students commented that they had a difficult time following the flow of discussion. These were also students who had difficulty following lecture. They tended to enjoy the Learning Curve activities, a computerized based instruction, which focuses upon factual knowledge that can be answered with short answers and vocabulary words. Given these two pieces of information, I suspect that the students who are having the most difficult time are less academically prepared. In contrast to the Learning Curve activities, my discussions focus on higher order thinking skills such as synthesis and analysis. I ask students to apply abstract principles and discuss multiple viewpoints. Some students are not as experienced as others at these tasks, and in addition have a difficult time to distinguish between essential information and background information. As I have discussed in my Teaching Goals, I have made it a point to try to provide support such as handouts or discussion summaries to aid students with emerging skills to separate the central points of the discussion from the background.
By the end of the semester, students had improved in their ability to learn from discussion. Some students continued to struggle, but most of the students mentioned that class discussion was their favorite component of class, and essential to their learning experience. One reason some students may have experienced difficulty is that they had not sufficiently prepared for class. I assigned Learning Curve (computerized review) activities as a way to prepare for class. I did not require that students complete the activity before class, because I wanted to give students flexibility and allow them to use their own judgment. A few students suggested that I assign the Learning Curve activities before class. I took their advice the next semester and did assign the Learning Curve activities before class. Making the assignment due before class gives students less flexibility, but emphasizes the role of the activities as providing an introduction to the material and background as a means to preparing for class and checking student’s understanding of assigned readings.
I taught Introduction to Psychology a second time. My initial evaluation showed improvement over the previous first half of the semester. Again students showed distinct preferences for one type of learning (discussion, lecture and activities) over the other two types. I noticed that I had several requests that my slides be more organized, or that I was moving too quickly through the slides. Several students requested that I post my slides online. While I know that most instructors post their slides and that practice can be helpful to students, there is some benefit to learning to take notes.
Students also critiqued the book, saying that the book was very specific, but my lectures were broader. I chose a full sized textbook, when many of my colleagues use brief versions. I find the full sized textbook provides more background to students, which results in a deeper understanding. The problem with this larger textbook is that it takes more work for students to decide which is the central information and which is background. This situation can be particularly frustrating for less experienced students, such as those commonly found in introductory courses. As an illustration of this problem, for one of the activities, I asked students to write examples of questions they thought I might put on exam. Some students wrote overly specific questions such as “What is the average age people marry?” I explained to the students that I would be unlikely to ask questions that are that specific. I would more likely ask students to identify in a multiple-choice question, a factor that predicts a long marriage.
I decided to summarize the requests in the evaluations and post them on a slide for discussion in class. Many students claimed their statements and were willing to give me further information about their requests. As a class, we decided that I would not post my slides, but that I would write a study guide that would help students to identify the material that would be the focus of the exam. The students expressed satisfaction with my study guide, and their performance on the exam was greatly improved. Students communicated that they understood the organization of my slides better, and I felt heartened that students felt they could trust me and realized that I wanted to meet their needs. I look forward to continuing an open communication style with students, which will allow me to work with students as team members so that we can achieve our mutual goals. This style has helped me to refine my craft by providing more support for students, communicating aims of activities through discussion and due dates, and providing study guides to help students learn to differentiate between background material and the focus of the course.