archives

I've actually ridden (driven?) a Segway, and it was surprisingly challenging. This one looks like it may actually be much easier (and cooler).

In spite of the above, student evaluations of faculty(SEF) have come under fire on several fronts.

A related complaint many have is that SEF encourage professors to dumb down courses in an effort to keep students happy at all costs. In one survey, 38% of professors admitted to making their courses easier in response to SEF.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got in my life (well, other than all the nuggets Rob always gives out ) was from an unofficial mentor of mine, George Thompson, when I first started teaching at Columbia College. The first round of feedback forms I got were fairly middling (a bunch of 3 - 3.5 on a scale of 5, IIRC). I was honestly fairly bummed about it, and went to talk to George about how crappy a teacher I was. His response was (and I'm probably grossly paraphrasing) basically "Don't try to please the student. Try to make them better designers." He said that unless the complaints were mostly about the teacher having no clue what s/he was saying, then it is not in the school's mission to please the student.

He noted that most of the complaints against me were mainly that I was too tough on them (with crits and grading), and that was what he wanted from his teachers. If any teacher was getting nothing but good marks, however, then that would usually mean that the teacher was not pushing them anywhere near enough.

G. F. Schueler draws our attention to a related case:

Socrates, who is usually thought to have been one of the world's "Great Teachers," nevertheless received rather low marks from his "students" on his final teaching evaluation. At a time of life when most of us would long since have retired, the Athenian jurors at his trial met his request for a pension by voting to put him to death...

Institutions seeking to improve teaching quality may take one or more of the following measures, which would not be subject, or would be less subject, to the objections of sections 3-6:

1. Faculty members could be offered courses or workshops on improving teaching effectiveness, receiving recognition on performance reviews for having taken such courses.

It has been my experience, as both a student and teacher at the college-level, that virtually none of the professors have had any formal teaching training themselves. That, in my opinion, is one of the biggest weaknesses of any post-bachelorate degree. The degrees (outside of education itself) do not require the students to take any actual teaching classes. Indeed, most Masters/Doctorate programs are structured in a way that actually discourage them from taking any non-major class (like teaching, or even public speaking).