The New York Times Magazine was devoted to academia and teaching this week. There were many good articles in there, which should appeal to the academic-heavy readership at 11D. Let’s first tackle the student evaluations article. (As I’m writing this post, I’m listening to this bloggingheads diavlog on student evals.)

Mark Oppenheimer reports that student evaluations are more important than ever. Faculty with bad student evaluations are being pushed out of universities. These evaluations are questionable. Students’ judgment may be shaded by the difficulty level of the class or by fancy PowerPoint slides, rather than really rating the professor on how smart he/she was and how much they learned in class. "Professors are more ambivalent, and they happily share theories — some
supported by research — that what students are really evaluating is
less pedagogy than whether a professor is funny, handsome or, above
all, an easy grader."

Are student evaluations an actuate measure of learning? Can they actually end up punishing good teachers who push the students to excel? Should schools care what the students think?

Whether these student evaluates are accurate or not, their weight is clearly being felt everywhere. Professors are now expected to please the masses and it’s is a rather rude shock to many academics who haven’t been trained to teach and, until now, have only been rewarded by peer reviewed publications.

So, how can professor improve their evals? I’m not sure, but these tips are the bare minimum:

Students like prepared professors. Don’t deviate from the syllabus too much. Come to class with notes. Don’t read from the notes, but have them to keep yourself on topic. Don’t deviate from the textbook too much. The students don’t want to feel like they’ve wasted their time reading material that you aren’t covering in class. Don’t change the dates of exams or quizzes. Return all exams within one week. Learn the students’ names. Don’t be too hard or too easy. Students don’t respect the pushover professors. If you are hard, they will still respect you, if you help them out a lot. Students want to leave a class with the feeling that they’ve learned something and they want lots of notes – so write stuff on the board or have PowerPoint outlines. Learn how to talk from your diaphragm and project your voice, so nobody falls asleep. Try very hard to not reveal your political position. Be respectful of the students and listen carefully to their points. Take the time to dress nicely. The students want to feel that their professor is knowledgeable and is professional. Admit when you don’t know something. Show up on time. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, so don’t try. 

A friend was telling me last week that some colleges may begin to offer tenure track jobs to teaching specialists and relieve them of the burden to publish. I liked that idea. Scholarship and teaching are two very different skills and not everybody is able to juggle both.

Gotta listen to the discussion on blogginghead about excessive specialization of academic research and the trend to vocation education schools. Two very different problems.