Course Evaluations and the Hidden Curriculum
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[Cross-posted from my AP Lit UCLA workshop.]
Out of curiosity, how many of you solicit course evaluations from your classes at the end of the year?
Do any of you solicit course evaluation feedback throughout the year?
Last year I experimented with this on my classes’ Moodle websites. I invited criticism and student feedback - using a single “dummy” username name and password I created for the purpose, and gave to all students - and created a forum called “How Can This Class be Better?” The forum was open 24/7, all year. It was fairly active all year too.
I was amazed at what I learned. No student was ever disrespectful or immature (and we’re talking 9th graders!), though they often used that anonymity to criticize this or that about the learning in the class (pace, focus, clarity, relevance, load, what have you). And the great majority of student contributions taught this teacher. (Actually, my first day of class speech formally forbids the words “teacher” and “student,” and changes our language to the much healthier, all-inclusive, “learners.”)
I can’t recommend this highly enough. Class morale and engagement - and respect for me as “teacher” - skyrocketed, because the “students” were unaccustomed to having conversations about their own education with their teachers in the past. (They are our “customers”, after all, not our employees or “subjects.”)
My instruction improved too, by adjusting when their feedback communicated new ideas and points of view to me. I didn’t honor every suggestion, but many of them I did. And their suggestions produced many highly reflective class conversations about what education means.
Like the hidden curriculum in the labels “teacher” and “student” (I always think “doctor” and “patient”), there’s a hidden curriculum being taught, whether we realize it or not, in the single “end of course evaluation” habit.
I’m curious to hear other views or stories about this. Is the practice of ongoing evaluation something you’ve done? Something common in your educational history?
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Clay,
I usually do some type of exit survey (like the ones teachers do at workshops!) but I like your idea of monitoring and adjusting throughout the course.
Our kids never lack for an opinion, and if they can comment anonymously, I should get a stream of helpful advice.
diane
[Reply]
diane
4 Aug 07 at 8:55 am
Clay,
Here lies the hidden power of teaching. By doing the ongoing survey, you empowered your students learning process. I have been stressing the importance of feedback to the teachers I have been working with all summer.
I know this is a bad comparison, but we can treat this like a film screening. We first need lots of audience feedback before we mass market the movie. This is valuable stuff to teachers. Let’s get more people to do it.
By the way, I think you will find that as much as you will be the tech coordinator, a lot of your time is going to be spent on basic pedagogy next year.
[Reply]
Patrick Higgins
5 Aug 07 at 8:10 am
Hi Clay,
I’d like to add a few less formal ways to collect feedback which I have found useful both online and in the classroom.
I will often include a final section to an assignment that asks the student to comment on the assignment itself - what changes would they recommend for next year’s students or if they were the teacher, what would they do differently with the assignment. There are usually marks assigned to completing this section of the assignment (either bonus or otherwise).
Another feedback mechanism I have found useful online is asking the students of the current course to leave ‘advice’ for the future students on within a particular forum or bulletin board. The first time I did this, I was just experimenting with the ‘community’ aspect of online courses but after I read the students’ responses, Boy did I get a lot of neat insight into my course! I also liked the idea that the new students (most were new to online & forums) had some worthwhile forum content to read immediately entering their course.
My two cents!
[Reply]
Sue
5 Aug 07 at 11:26 am
Sue - Excellent additions to the list! (And wonderful to see a Sri Lankan voice here - I did a teacher habitat trip to Anaradapura, which I probably misspelled, in ‘05 and fell in love with SL. Thanks for saying hi.)
Patrick and Diane - thanks for the comments. We’ll see how this all plays out this year. Interesting to look forward to wearing two hats. It gives the opportunity for comparison between different teacher approaches at my school as we go 1:1. More later - off to the first day of school.
[Reply]
Clay Burell
5 Aug 07 at 5:30 pm