Rainy Days and Student Surveys

I wrote the following blog a while ago but waited to publish it until now to allow time to put distance between the evaluations and the students who gave them. As student evaluation time is coming around again, now seemed the right time to share it.

It turns out that bad weather is good for encouraging deep thinking. Which is just as well, because student evaluation surveys have the potential to make me feel a little under the weather.

Last semester I taught a number of different courses in science education across multiple campuses to preservice teachers including First Year Bachelor of Education (Primary) students and Fourth Year Bachelor of Education (Primary).

At the end of the semester, all students are encouraged to complete surveys. I know the responses are collated and emailed to all the lecturers and tutors, and I suspect they go much further afield too because we use them as part of our quality assurance processes.

The email with survey summaries for last semester's courses arrived today, complete with handy graphs. Here are two of mine:

Table 1. Evaluations by 4th Year Bachelor of Education (Primary) students

Table 2. Evaluations by 1st Year Bachelor of Education (Primary) students

 The first thing I noticed was that the responses of the first year students are overwhelmingly positive (Table 2), while the fourth year students are much more ambivalent about my teaching (Table 1).

• Is this because the first year students have lower expectations and the fourth year students are more discerning? 
• Was the content of the tutorials clearer in my mind for the first year course? 
• What criteria do students use when making these judgements? Are the first year students comparing me to their high school teachers while the fourth year students compare me to other tertiary teachers; or do they have some sort of criteria that they apply to all teachers? 
• Not all students responded. How would the results be different if there was a higher response rate: better or worse?

As well as responding to questions on a Likert scale, students are invited to make comments. The comments I received are such a mixed bag: some say my teaching was the best thing about the course; others say it was the worst thing and that I didn't know what I was talking about most of the time! It's hard to hear some of their comments. At times it's because they obviously come from a place of pain. On other occasions it's because they are painfully true.

I feel the danger of wondering how closely students' evaluations of our teaching reflect the marks they achieved. While the responses are anonymous, I sometimes imagine I hear the voices of the students behind them because I have already heard these concerns; but perhaps instead it is someone else making the same comment. The university's support website reminds me:

In addition to student feedback, teaching staff should draw on a range of evidence, including peer and self-reflection, and current literature on on effective teaching and learning.

I try to keep all of this in mind as I plan how I will teach this coming semester.

Some students find it hard to use the professional tone that teachers aim for in report comments: that even-handed voice that tries to give an objective, measurable account of a student's understanding rather than offer personal criticisms or praise. Instead I can hear their anger, their frustration and their disappointment through their comments about my teaching. (There are positive comments too - thankfully - but it's the negative ones that I feel the greatest need to understand.) I try to stand above the emotion to see the deeper message and to learn from it. Sometimes the comments are so cruel that it's hard to take the criticism at face value. It reminds me of the need to give feedback to students that is kind, honest and professional so that they will be more receptive and be better able to use it to improve.

My personal research tells me that preservice teachers will teach in the manner in which they were taught. In my classes, I try to model for my students that as a teacher it's OK to say, "I don't know the answer to that yet," because this is what will happen to them in the classroom too. Teaching and learning go hand-in-hand and I want them to expect that they will need to learn alongside their students, just as I am learning alongside them. I think I made this point often. Still, some students criticise me for not responding immediately to their questions about science. However, I also acknowledge that I did not always follow through: I did not always go back the following week with answers I had promised. I'm going to have to put in place systems to help me track my promises and ensure that I improve.

Others complain that I didn't give them immediate feedback on their presentations like all the other tutors, even though I explained that I needed time to check ideas they shared that were new to me so that my grades were fair and accurate. I wonder how I can help them see that teachers need thinking time too?

Students do not have to make comments but many do and there seems to be no set length. The long, impassioned efforts of students to critique the course cut me to the core because I can see them: I can see our students and their desire to do well, I can see the effort they put into their work, I can see their yearning to help us understand where their difficulties and frustrations stem from, so that future students may benefit from their insights. I can see the teachers they are striving to become.

I can also see the children that they will one day teach, I can see the colleagues they will work with, and the parents and administrators they will have to be accountable to. As tutor to these future teachers, I feel my responsibilities towards all these groups most keenly. When I mark their assignments, I feel the responsibility to ensure that they know enough to start with, because I know that they will continue to learn and know more the longer they teach.

In this moment, I see myself reflected in their feedback and know that I, too, will continue to improve; and I know that in this moment, I am good enough to be their teacher.

• How do you solicit information from your students about your teaching? 
• What filters do you apply as you seek to interpret their answers?
• What comments have help you the most to improve your practice?