Tl;dr: Get the student evals gremlin off your back with my framework for tracking how your teaching meets your goals and your students' goals, plus advice on how to reframe your teaching goals for tenure, review, and promotion.
I don't bake cookies.
And I teach online.
So, I can't bring cookies to class to ensure that my student evals are nice and high.
(There's so much discussion of the pros and cons of student evals [1], I'm not going to re-litigate that here. I will say, though, that we perpetuate injustice by using unjust metrics. And at the same time, accountability, assessment, and feedback are top values of mine with regard to making good teaching better and thereby making higher ed more just for learners and instructors. So, I support an equitable, justice-oriented combination of student feedback, peer observation, expert coaching, and administrative accountability mechanisms.)
But, it's the start of the semester. Why am I focusing on end-of-semester evals now?!
Because: if we wait until the end of the semester, it's too late for alternative assessment mechanisms. [2]
Let me describe what usually happens. Then, I'll map out what you can do instead.
I had a conversation last fall with a colleague who may not re-teach a new course they spent a lot of time building, depending solely on whether the student evals are good or not. It was nearly the end of the semester, and as we talked, my colleague sounded discouraged. That puzzled me, because I'd heard good things about the course from other faculty who'd been guests in it. The course met a real need and did so in a contemporary way as far as I could tell from numerous conversations I'd had with this colleague. [3]
The colleague went on to explain that they just weren't sure if their all their time and effort was recognized and appreciated by the students. My impression was that this colleague also wasn't trusting themself to gauge the students' learning through the work they had done over the semester.
This is a crummy situation for anyone to be in.
And, it's preventable, as long as we stop looking to student evals as the metric for gauging the efficacy of a course or instructor. Below, I'll describe what you can do now, at the start of the semester, so you're not feeling cornered come May. After that, I'll share my end-of-term, better than nothing strategy if your course is almost over.
Best case: Articulate your own goals & map your own process and metrics to them
Start with this at the beginning of the term, and weave it throughout the course. This sounds like a heavy lift, I know. But, you don't have to do a whole strategic planning process. Just answer this question:
What are the three things max you want students to understand/be able to do by the end of your course?
Max three. After all, "if you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities" [4] and saying yes to everything will fry you.
For instance, in the main scicomm course I teach, my top three takeaways for students are:
Communication is vital in personal, civic, and professional settings; being good at it helps in myriad ways, not least of which is that communication competency makes a science degree itself into a transferable skill. [5]
We all have values (even scientists!), and pretending we don't makes us less credible, not more so; the corollary is that considering other people's values is effective and respectful, not spin or "marketing."
Thus, we should use dialogue and coproduction, not the deficit model, when sharing science (including teaching, co-produced and applied research, scicomm, etc.).
There is a necessary outcome of articulating 1-3 priorities. Everything in your course should be working toward them. Assignments, in-class activities, information you present, assessments (exams, projects, whatever) all hew to those goals. [6]
Use these priorities to set up at least three ways to tie the course to your goals.
Plan to do at least three activities per goal [7] in the course that provide you with insight into whether students/the course accomplished your takeaway. If you do your three activities/goal, you will have a robust framework for understanding course impacts.
For our example of my scicomm course, let's look at takeaway 2: we all have values. I do several things in my class that (a) ensure I actually address this with students and (b) help me see how they understand and use this concept in their scicomm work. I've listed them under their own heading (below), because they are both an example of what I do and one of the main things I recommend you do.
Have students set and iteratively reflect on their own goals
In week 1, I ask students to write me a brief note about their goals and concerns for the course.
In week 4, we do a full class session on life and career goals, which I tie into why they are in this scicomm class and why they are getting a science degree. I ask them to read a related paper and then write a reflection on their big-picture goals.
Throughout the semester, they then tie their values to those of the people they're trying to reach with their scicomm projects. (They do so by working through the process detailed in a paper of mine [8], including identifying their own values and completing a detailed, multi-page worksheet about the values of the people they're connecting with.)
At mid-terms, I distribute an anonymous survey (via Google Form) that asks them questions about their own progress toward their goals, what they are doing to achieve those goals, how the course contributes to their goals, etc. (Click here to download a template for this survey.)
In week 15, I ask students to revisit their goal statements from weeks 1 and 4, and to write a reflection about how they think they did on working toward their own goals. (Click here to download a template for these pre-/post-term reflections.)
In your case, you could modify item 2 and skip item 3. But, if you did items 1, 4, and 5, you'd have a solid framework for understanding how students perceive your course connecting to their goals.
What if goal-setting just feels like a tacked-on kumbaya thing?
You might use a slightly different framing than I do, that's fine. But, you can be confident that students find it intuitive to state some kind of learning goal and reflect on how they're progressing. (Whether students articulate robust goals, or recognize that your course contributes to their "obvious" goals, depends on how much you help them see the relevance of your course to those goals.) So, of course, you don't want to just tack-on these goal activities. Your best bet is to map goals onto your content. Here are two examples.
1. You might connect goals and reflection (aka assessment!) to the typical processes of science:
hypotheses = goals for what we want to understand/test, reflection on whether we have testable hypotheses
experimental design/methods = goals for how we are going to pursue the questions, reflection on whether the methods were apt or productive
analysis = goals for how we will understand the results, reflection on the outcomes of our study
reporting of results = goals for what the results will mean to other people, reflection on whether we answered our questions and what we'll investigate next
2. You could frame goals as part of a scholarly writing process:
review potential target journals = goals for understanding where our work is relevant and will find an intended reader, reflection on whether we need to reframe our work, do more data collection, consider different types of articles, etc.
consider the priorities of those journals vs. our own = goals alignment, reflection similar to previous point
select a focal journal and prepare your manuscript for submission = goal of writing a compelling paper that gets published, reflection on feedback from editors and reviewers
Embedding goals-driven reflection in your course does a lot for you.
Time to make a difference: Review students' initial goals/concerns in week 1 or 2 and you have loads of time to reframe or even adjust coursework to help students see the course's relevance.
Get ahead of learning gaps: You will be able to gauge, well before end-of-term evals, whether your students do see the relevance of the course and whether they are owning their own responsibility as learners, etc. That means you have more time to make adjustments to get them there.
Connect the dots for students to help you connect the dots: At the end of the course, you'll again help students see their own role in learning toward their goals, and you'll hear directly from them how they perceive your course contributing to their learning.
Make learners responsible for their own learning: If you look carefully at how I've framed the prompts above, and how I've described throughout this piece what students are doing, you'll see that my wording deliberately makes students responsible for their own learning. We increasingly hear concerns about students and parents misunderstanding college (and by association us and our courses) as concierge edutainment. Whether you're encountering students with accountability hang-ups or just noticing that a lot of your students don't recognize the initiative and responsibility they need to take, these "what do you want/what are you doing to get there" activities make learner responsibility tangible. Doing so helps you delineate between your responsibility (and ability!) to support their success and their own. Making these distinctions at the beginning of the term and at mid-terms is much more productive than wrestling over it at the end.
But this is all subject to brown-nosing and a total fake-job from AI.
Yes, true. But, also, some version of those same concerns has been inherent in teaching for a long time.
The honest truth is that I have no interest in policing the "truth" of what students write about their goals. All that does is make me dislike teaching and them resent an environment that is focused more on regulation than learning. My approach is to assume that students get enough from my course to take these metacognitive assignments seriously. It's not a lot of extra work for me because my policy is to take them at face-value.
Great; now I have to read these goals statements. That's extra time I don't have.
I've tried the alternative. It felt worse and didn't save time. Without this goals framework, I started, taught through, and ended the term with only my own gremlin of doubt to inform my sense of efficacy in the classroom. Caring about being effective meant I thought a lot about whether each assignment, class session, etc., actually was effective. That's time that I'd really rather spend understanding if the course is effective. Since I learned (from great mentors!) to do some of these things, that load has lightened.
I've found that reading these goals statements and incremental reflections is a more efficient and positive use of my time than worrying and wallowing and compensating with teaching-related overwork. In fact, this is the best "grading" I do for some straightforward reasons:
Most students really do see the value in thinking about what they want to learn. They appreciate seeing for themselves how my course is calibrated to help them work toward those goals. It's a pleasure to read their candid reflections.
The students' insights about why the course mattered to them helps me make these connections ever clearer for subsequent students.
Most students see my course as a hurdle to graduation because they have to pass an upper-level communications course. Mine is at least in their department, so they default to it. That means they start out with a lot of concerns and only some generic goals (e.g., they are basically all worried about their writing skills). Through this iterative goals/reflections work, I get to see them discover how the course relates to what they care about. That's pretty awesome!
End-of-semester, better than nothing version
If all this sounds great, but your course is ending, and you have a sinking feeling in your stomach like my colleague did, just do item 5 from the goals activity sequence above.
You might want to modify it a tad, so ask the students to think back to what they thought the course would be and why they were in it. Then ask them to reflect on what surprised them about the course and what they did to connect the course to their own priorities.
Be sure to do this before you provide in-class time to do your university's standard course eval. (And yes, you should provide time in class. Otherwise, you're likely to get a low response rate and only the people with an axe to grind may respond.) If you have the bandwidth (and the situational privilege to feel secure doing so), you can also facilitate a discussion about the biases inherent in student evals (also before you give time to complete them in-class).
Whose evals are these, anyway?
You notice I haven't said the first thing about administrators or colleagues observing your class or even soliciting feedback from your campus teaching support center?
Sure, it's true that our peers and administrators review us. And that review process often determines whether we keep our jobs, whether we get raises and other resources, what our future teaching responsibilities are, etc.
But, it's actually not helpful to start with what those gatekeepers (no matter how well-meaning) want from us. In fact, it's debilitating to let that drive our work (scholarship, teaching, service, any of it). They don't do the work, you do. And, you need to take satisfaction from it to keep doing it. (Basically all the research indicates fear and shame are demotivating; interestingly, though, vindictiveness/I'll-show-you vibes are pretty motivating.)
By using the feedback framework I've suggested here, you can flip the script. A lot of my thinking around this comes from a vital piece of advice from Dr. Beronda Montgomery: work from affirmation in academia, not for it. What does that look like in this context?
Well, if you've read this far into this piece, you're invested in teaching, so I'm not going to worry about caveats for slackers, coasters, people who denigrate teaching, etc. You care about students. You want to have confidence that your teaching makes a difference. So, trust yourself. Let your own goals be the ultimate metric. Did you do what you intended? Did you overwork to do it? Could you have the same efficacy while giving yourself some grace next term?
With the goals-activities-reflections framework I've outlined here, you can collect tangible evidence of what aspects of your course are getting students to your key takeaways. You can anonymously quote students in your review packets or job applications as evidence that your courses are effective. You can (even very simply) code out responses to present statistics about how many students find your course relevant, effective, motivating, etc. Certainly you can tie these outcomes into the stated learning outcomes for your degree program and department (or those of the one you're applying to).
In doing so, you can ideally move away from the worry and disappointment my colleague expressed. Instead, you can say things like this:
"End-of-semester student evaluations are known to be highly biased and susceptible to even minor manipulations (e.g., cookies = better evals). Thus, I prefer to concentrate on mid-term and end-of-semester feedback from students, as well as peer evaluations. Evidence from these sources indicates xyz..." [9]
The bottom line is that you are framing your own intentions for your teaching and then documenting how you are achieving them.
YMMV
I'll close by acknowledging that there's great privilege in even being able to say/feel like I can frame up my own goals, adjust my course content accordingly, and state all this candidly to my colleagues. To ensure that all people working in academia have this privilege, we need to normalize these kinds of approaches. Those of us who are able to must create and protect space for people who can't as readily (due to career stage, identity, socioeconomic and caregiving constraints, etc.). At the same time, those of us who can should also hold accountable the people who have undervalued (and slacked off at) teaching for too long. I genuinely hope this framework helps you feel more confident working for this for yourself and for colleagues.
This post is based on material from my forthcoming book, Helping Students Write in the Sciences. Connect to more related resources here.
NOTES
[1] I find these two articles an adequate orientation to the debate over student evals: A Reflection of Faculty and Course Evaluations (very short) and the classic Availability of cookies during an academic course session affects evaluation of teaching.
[2] I hear you groaning - assessment is a four-letter word, I know. And also, whatever the alternatives are, they are bound to be extra work. Amiright? Well, read on and see why I think this framework could actually save you time.
[3] A little more context: this colleague is someone who has taught for a long time, and only in their specialty for at least ten years. The course they were talking about was new to them, and they had completely rebuilt it, after our department let it lapse through a combination of lack of people to teach it, no one really liking how it was taught, and it no longer being a requirement in our major. The course relates to things I do and teach, too, so I'd had a number of discussions, shared books and other resources, and generally been very interested in how my colleague thought the course was going.
[4] Quote attributed to Jim Collins
[5] Yep. That's right. My hot take: Communication isn't the transferable skill. Communication is a foundational skill(set) that things like science knowledge can be added to.
[6] This is the basic concept of backwards design, a central idea in modern pedagogy. It's easy to misunderstand pedagogical work as "extra" work that "doesn't count" and doesn't make a difference. But, beyond the benefits for your students, backwards design can help you reduce your teaching workload by keeping you focused on what you're trying to accomplish with a course (and what's actually feasible in the span of that course).
[7] Why am I making so much extra work!?! Three activities per goal is nine new activities, right!? Well, we can think of it this way: if you have a 16-week semester (including finals week), and if you have a 3-credit course, we're talking about 2 or 3 class sessions * 15 weeks + 1 exam slot for a total of 46 times in the semester when you can facilitate something with the students. If you add in whatever coursework, quizzes, exams, etc., that you assign, there are likely close to 100 opportunities to connect your students to the key takeaways you've identified. I'm suggesting you allocate a mere 9% of those opportunities to the most important three things in your course. (Which does beg the question of why all that less-important stuff is occupying the other 91% of our courses. 🤔)
[8] Let me know if you can't access the file; I'm happy to send you a PDF.
[9] I used that exact language in the narrative for my most recent retention and promotion review packet. Certainly other aspects of my work have bearing on my colleagues' assessment of my work, but the end result was a recommendation that I go up two years early for my next promotion (I'm not on the tenure-track, so that's not as extreme as it seems, but it's still great). I wish the same for you!
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