How is your teaching?
Author: Arlene Vinion Dubiel
Teaching is my passion. It can be frustrating, it can be lonely, it can be challenging, and it can be pure joy. Because it is my passion, I want to know that I’m teaching as best as possible and supporting my students’ learning. But how do I know if I’m teaching well?
Measures of teaching
One way to evaluate teaching is to measure students’ learning. Students’ grades, or improvement on pre-post assessments, can demonstrate that students have learned, and we can reasonably assume that increased understanding is due to teaching. Comparing learning across different course sections with other instructors makes it possible to use common assessments. Common assessment is not a perfect approach for all courses. It cannot be used for single-section courses, and the assessment needs to be of good quality and demonstrate validity for the content that is supposed to be taught within the course. The confounding factor is that instructors may “teach to the test” if the assessment material is known.
Another option often used in the K-12 setting is classroom observation. There’s a variety of instruments available to evaluate teaching using live or video observations. Moreover, it’s demonstrated that there’s a positive correlation between teachers’ observation scores and students’ assessment scores. Classroom observations also have the power to identify specific strengths and areas for improvement with teaching. However, a classroom observation is time-intensive for the observer, and multiple observations would need to be collected to measure teaching quality accurately.
Sadly, a classroom observation is rarely, if ever, used in the college setting. In my 15+ years of teaching, I’ve been observed twice. Once I didn’t receive any constructive feedback. Instead, the observer said they came to my class just to “check the box” that I was teaching. For the other observation, I specifically invited the dean after he offered to come and observe me. Let me say that again. In 15+ years, I’ve been observed twice. Classroom observation is a sadly underused method to evaluate teaching at the college level, even though it could be beneficial.
At my current college, I’m required to write an annual service report. In this report, I can explain what I’ve done to serve my students and improve my teaching. While this kind of self-report has its biases, there are some positives in that it promotes reflection and encourages instructors to improve instruction. A colleague described this report as a way to “explain away any bad teaching evaluations you might receive.”
The final and most often used evaluation of teaching is student evaluations. Giving students a survey takes little time, provides multiple data points, and can automatically be analyzed statistically to evaluate teacher quality when done electronically. There is an added benefit in that the evaluation is completed by the very population affected by the teaching. However, students’ evaluations may not provide an accurate view of how well an instructor can teach.
Pros and (mostly) cons of students’ evaluation of teaching
Because most colleges use student evaluations of teaching as a measure of instructor effectiveness and use this information to make promotion, tenure, and continued contract decisions for instructors, this evaluation method has been relatively well-researched. While student evaluations have promise, time and again, it’s been demonstrated that results are based upon factors that are not associated with teaching quality.
One of the most noticeable factors that affect student evaluations of teaching is instructor gender, race, and ethnicity. In this study, identical online courses were evaluated by students, with the only difference being the introductory video of the instructor. Women and minority instructors consistently received lower evaluation scores than white males, indicating that students likely have implicit racial and gender bias and that this comes across in their teaching evaluation.
As evidenced not by grades but by knowledge increase, students’ learning is not consistently related to students’ evaluation of instructors. Instructors with high student evaluation scores do not have students with increased learning, despite that being the assumption that higher-quality teaching means increased learning. Further, students’ learning from various instructors appears to be situational - sometimes they learn more from instructors to whom they give poor evaluations.
This evidence demonstrates that students are not necessarily accurate evaluators of what makes high-quality teaching. Further, students are not always capable of perceiving their own learning. The oft-cited article from Harvard physicists showed that students learned more when engaged in active learning and believed they learned more from a lecture than from active strategies. Further, they liked lectures and thought that lecturers were more effective instructors.
Incentives for teacher growth
Because colleges value student evaluations of teaching as a measure of instructor quality and because students perceive that they learn through lecture, there is little incentive for instructors to teach using anything other than lecture. Further, there is a widely believed myth that great teachers are naturally great teachers. They are naturally comfortable in front of the classroom, charismatic, and good storytellers. If you equate good teaching with good lecturing, some instructors seem to be inherently good teachers. However, good lecturing is not the same as good teaching. And good teaching is a skill that can be developed.
How can we develop good teaching skills? This has been the topic of a weekly newsletter on teaching by Beth McMurtrie and Beckie Supiano of The Chronicle of Higher Education. This series is usually quite relevant and thought-provoking. I highly recommend subscribing for free. Lately, they're focusing on how college instructors can implement research-backed teaching strategies and what colleges can do to support these instructors. But change is hard, and instructors need some incentive to try and implement these strategies that, while shown to increase learning, students may not like or appreciate. In other words, with student evaluations of teaching being the sole measure of teacher quality, there's no incentive to change your teaching strategies to focus on student learning.
The myth of the natural teacher needs to be dispelled, and higher education needs to appreciate instructors’ efforts to incorporate research-backed teaching and learning strategies. Colleges need to use measures of quality teaching other than student evaluations. It’s not enough to offer professional development but to ask what was incorporated into the classroom. Multiple measures of teaching quality, like those mentioned above, need to be added to student evaluations, mainly when decisions are being made on tenure, promotion, or contract extension.
As a shameless plug, incentivizing change for the math classroom is what Almy Education does. By working with colleges, we help develop programs that address students’ math learning needs while supporting instructors in implementing research-backed teaching and learning strategies. But for this change to be effective, colleges need to buy into the process and support instructors who incorporate these strategies.
If we want our students to learn, our teaching strategies need to change, and higher education needs to promote that change. De-emphasize student evaluations of teaching and instead promote “the hard work required to become a better teacher.” Additional ideas were shared in the recent Chronicle Teaching newsletter on Overcoming the Barriers Toward Better Teaching. Bottom line, let’s value quality teaching by changing how we measure it - to focus on instructor growth rather than student perception.