What Every EMS Educator Should Know About

EVALUATING EVALUATIONS
preparation, but too many felt that I didn’t integrate
reading assignments closely enough into live-class
lessons. That was an easy adjustment to make and my
evaluations soon reflected that change.
Alas, the biggest thing you’ll learn from official evaluations
is that you usually don’t learn all that much.
First of all, the sample is seldom representative — it
represents only the views of those who happened to
be in class the day you handed out the evaluations.
Inevitably, your best students will come down with
debilitating senioritis that day, and some of the worst
will have just recovered from it. (It’s amazing how the
intellectually halt and lame enjoy health and attendance
resurgences at the end of the semester!) Only
colleges that require all students to fill out evaluations
— some impose fines on those who don’t — can be
said to be comprehensive.
Even if you get a 100 percent return, however, official
evaluations are inherently flawed. Too much
of what they purport to evaluate applies quantitative
measures to qualitative experiences. I know that
many colleagues disagree with me on this score, and
some whom I admire greatly have labored hard on
creating evaluative tools, but I simply don’t believe
it’s possible to quantify how professors have nurtured
things such as abstract thought, intellectual maturity,
curiosity, elegance of expression, creativity, or zeal for
learning.
I find that there are more useful forms of feedback
and that these eventually will be reflected on the official
bubble sheets. One of the best ways to know how
you’re doing is to ask students. Very few will have the
moxie to slam you in person, but you can ask openended
questions that will yield important information.
(In small classes you can do this orally; in large
ones you may wish to have a short in-class exercise.)
I ask questions such as: What assignment did you like
best this semester and why? Which did you like least
and why? What was the very best thing about this
course and what made it so? What do you wish we
had done more of? What’s the thing you’ll remember
most about this class? If I had to drop one thing from
the class, what should it be and why?
Be prepared to be astonished at the answers. You may
find that the book or article you found most fascinating
is dubbed the most useless. (Some students will
admit they gave up on it.) If students tell you that the
biggest thing they’ll take away from the course is your
personality, jokes, or antics, revise for next semester.
You’re here to shape minds, not build fan clubs.
Some student feedback can be distressingly revelatory. I
had been teaching for three years when I did something
I had not done before or since: I left my lesson folder
at home. I only discovered this an hour before class
and spent a frantic 60 minutes assembling a makeshift
plan. That panic attack led to end-of-the-semester
soul-searching when many students cited that day’s
lesson as their favorite. Upon reflection I realized that I
had stripped the lesson to its basics. By necessity it was
sparse, but it was also clear and less claustrophobic than
my usual detail-choked lectures. That feedback led me
to pare details from lectures in favor of leaving space for
narrative development, analogies, and student discussion.
My official ratings shot up.
Other things I’ve learned directly from students: They
love it when I confess I don’t know something that
they do. They like it when I ask them to think through
a problem with me rather than simply telling them the
answer, but they get annoyed if I prolong the process.
They enjoy it when I redirect questions and involve lots
of people in the discussion. Students get animated when
I relate course materials to things in their world (films,
music, university issues). They turn off if I’m too critical
of their work. The latter was an important lesson. Like
many scholars fresh from grad school, I found it easier
to critique than to affirm. Students taught me to use
praise as prelude to criticism. If all of these things strike
you as merely good pedagogy, I’d agree. But I’ll humbly
admit they didn’t always seem that way.
The other evaluation you should pay attention to is selfevaluation.
Learn to trust your instincts. We can learn a
lot from others, but official evaluations are sometimes
kinder than they should be. If you muse on your semester,
you’ll easily recall the things that worked well. Repeat
next semester. You’ll also remember what bombed.
Jettison these. Flops, alas, occur throughout one’s
career. This fall, I organized a writing course around the
theme of preparing to become a public intellectual. It
seemed like a good idea, but it wasn’t. It will not be the
theme of next semester’s class. It didn’t even last the semester.
I did a mid-course correction because students
let me know my plan wasn’t working.
My conclusion is a simple one: no matter where you
are on the career path, evaluators can help you refocus.
Take good feedback to heart; just don’t let bad feedback
break it.
Article “Evaluating Evaluations” re-printed with
permission from Inside-HigherEd.com.
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