It is a truth universally acknowledged that any change a teacher makes in response to complaints on student course evaluations will inspire a whole new set of complaints.
I envy my colleagues who tell me they never read their course evaluations. I keep telling myself to ignore them. After all, there is literally nothing at stake for me--no more promotions, not much chance of competing for teaching awards, no fear of being fired for bad teaching. I am confident in my abilities and I generally have a good sense of what's working and what isn't, so the course evaluations do little more than reinforce what I already suspected. ("Her tests are hard"--right, I knew that, but they're a lot easier for student who actually do the reading.)
But then why do I obsess over the negative comments? They're not exactly overwhelming; in fact, our response rates for course evaluations have fallen so low that it would be ridiculous to take them very seriously. Last semester I had a class in which only two students responded to course evaluations. They said nice things, but that's just two students--what about the other 16?
And this spring semester I had two classes in which not a single student submitted a course evaluation. Okay, we were all exhausted at the end of the pandemic-teaching year and there's no reward for submitting evaluations, but I've never before had zero response from half of my classes. One of those classes had only four students enrolled but the other had 16, so I would have expected at least a few responses.
So I ended up with course evaluations from my two sophomore-level literature classes, but even there the response rate was right around 40 percent. Numbers and comments were mostly positive, but as usual, one negative comment sticks in my craw: the student complained that I was "rude." Why? Because I called on random students in the middle of class, expecting them to comment on the reading assignments.
Let me just briefly quibble with the word random: I didn't just grab the next student who happened to be walking down the hallway and demand that she tell me what she noticed about the difference between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson's line lengths; I called on students who were enrolled in a class in which they were expected to engage in discussion on specific works of literature. Whatever their reasons for registering in my classes, they were there for the purpose of studying literature, which is what I tried to get them to do. There's nothing random about that.
It's true that I called on various students in the middle of class, but that was intentional: I was trying to deal with students' increasing unwillingness to engage in class discussion. As long as I've been teaching, I've regularly received complaints on course evaluations stating that I need to engage more students in class discussion, and with the problem worsening under pandemic conditions, I took the bull by the horns and set out to call on every single student in my literature classes at least once a week. Sometimes I would go down the course roster and call on students to comment on the reading; sometimes I went row by row. When the gunners in the front row tried to dominate the conversation, I would ask for a response from further back, and I was often pleased to hear the interesting insights provided by students who wouldn't normally volunteer to comment.
So the system worked--except when I called on students who hadn't done the reading. I might say something mildly admonitory like "Try harder next time," which a particularly thin-skinned student might interpret as rude, but the course evaluation complaint made it clear that the very act of cold-calling students in the middle of class is rude.
On the other hand, I didn't get a single complaint about the need to engage more students in the discussion. That's a first! And I'll accept that as evidence that cold-calling is a valid response to students' unwillingness to engage. If they don't want to talk about literature, they should take a different class; the rest of us are gathered together non-randomly to discuss literature, and we're going to do that regardless of whether my methods are considered rude.
3 comments:
The trick that #2 taught me re: course discussion and cold-calling is to provide the general discussion questions with the reading as homework. (The homework is then check/no check for completion.) That way people tend not to get that terrified cold-called reaction-- they have their notes to fall back on.
Cold calling on students is the class equivalent of telemarketing. A student is thinking: “If i wanted to talk i would have talked. Otherwise, leave me alone.” The concept, in a classroom, does indeed make some students work harder and makes other students think the teacher is being unnecessarily bothersome (aka: rude). I think the technique of cold calling works in most classes…and i think one student complaining on an evaluation means very little.
I agree that one complaint means very little, but you know I'm going to obsess over that one complaint, whether it's valid or not. I keep hearing, though, that students are fearful of talking in class, and I just don't get that. I mean, I understand that some students are shy, but when 90 percent of the students in the class seem to be trembling in fear of opening their mouths, something is wrong. I'm really not that scary! I try to run a casual, open, fun class, welcoming all kinds of student input. With the general-education literature classes, though, there's this general belief that the literature has some secret hidden meaning that only the teacher knows, despite all my efforts to disempower that belief.
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