Student Course Evaluations

Final course evaluations for the past 2 years

Spring 2015

Fall 2015

Spring 2016

Fall 2016

Spring 2017

Introduction: The numbers

Over the past two years, I have taught a wide variety of courses, from first-year composition to a graduate seminar on the history of the eighteenth-century British novel. From a birds-eye view, my courses offer students what they perceive to be effective educational opportunities. Please note that the following charts are interactive. With an average course grade of C+ or B-, students rate the overall quality of my courses as learning experiences at 3.83 out of 5. I exceed this general survey response score in almost every other category. Among the highest-scored features of my pedagogy are the challenging nature of my pedagogy, my responsiveness as a teacher, and the content of my feedback. I have adapted my pedagogy and course content in a number of ways to respond to student concerns, and you can read about them below and in the Expected Levels of Performance section.

When I break this data down by course type, a clearer narrative of my teaching emerges. The widest gap in response scores occurs in Advanced Literature (LT-2) courses taught in the core, at the 400-level. Notably, these courses typically have only EN102 as a prerequisite, and yet expect students to do work at a more advanced level. It is unsurprising for there to be more variation here, as a result. I also have a wider range of response scores in courses required for our major and minor students; this may result from varying levels of interest or commitment between majors and minors.

EN340 Midterm Feedback

Midterm course feedback

I also routinely give midterm feedback opportunities, which helps me micro-adjust during the course of the term and determine if there are any major problems not immediately visible. Some changes I have made in response to midterm feedback includes cutting some readings, revisiting/going back over key assignments, or scheduling more one-on-one or small group meetings in office hours. Below, please find an example of student responses compiled and organized by a graduate assistant for EN340 (Fall 2015):

Discussion

Overall trends, and the reading load issue

The most visible trends noted as areas of improvement in my student evaluations include difficulty and quantity of the work involved, as well as the pace. Some students have also commented negatively on transparency of expectations. However, these comments are virtual hallmarks of courses featuring focused reading and writing (see this article, this article, and this article), where students perceive the material as "subjective." While, as Charlie Wesley has written for the Chronicle of Higher Education, new professors can indeed tend to give too much reading, I have since 2006 adjusted those expectations, and I also follow his logic of weighting reading assignments differently over both the course of the week for a twice-a-week meeting schedule and the course of the term. I also spend more time on close reading, and I try to select readings that will cover the same intellectual bases while also being of interest to students. However, the average amount of reading expected in colleges across the US is somewhere around 80-100 pages a week at the lower levels, and nearly 200 at the upper levels. Wesley, for instance, notes "When I’m teaching a 200-level literature course, I will usually ask students to read 80 to 120 pages between Thursday’s class meeting and the following session, on Tuesday. However, I assign only a third as much reading — 30 to 40 pages — from Tuesday to Thursday." The History Department at Montclair State University gives similar general guidelines for reading and writing loads. These are not ivy leagues; at the University of Chicago, students report slightly higher averages in humanities classes. Today, I typically assign no more than 100 pages a week in the highest level classes I teach, lower than these averages, and in 200-level classes, the assigned pages are much lower (perhaps 30). For instance, in EN207, we typically cover one play every 2-2.5 weeks, and many of these plays are less than 3 acts. I understand that our students often have full time or part time jobs, families to take care of, and many other important concerns that can limit their ability to complete the coursework, these comment trends are in many respects not relatively significant across either our department or humanities classes across the US. I have sought at every turn to address these concerns, primarily by lessening the amount of reading in my courses (in EN340, for instance, substantially), developing rubrics and refining my assignment sheets for clarity, spending more time in class discussing the assignments, and providing models of strong student essays.

On the other hand, students also comment on my willingness to help improve writing, the quality of my feedback, the timeliness of my email replies, and individualized attention. The amount of reading and writing I expect does have an impact on this--it is my responsibility to help my students with difficult material. These trends are visible in comments at all levels.

The most visible trends noted as areas of strength include willingness to help improve writing, quality of feedback, individualized attention, engaging discussions, and compelling material. I am most proud of my teaching when I receive comments about being challenging, but fair, or when I receive thoughtful comments about the material we have studied. These trends, too, are visible in comments at all levels.

Composition

One of the things students always comment on is reading load. In earlier iterations of the course, I taught only prose fiction, for interest and relative ease of reading. However, prose fiction is long, and in an effort to address student concerns, I revised the reading material to de-emphasize novels and incorporate a wider range of genres--including poetry and drama. While crafting this promotion portfolio, I realized that students found the material we covered in earlier iterations of the class more interesting than the later content. For instance, in the Spring 2014 and Fall 2015 versions of EN340, I received notably strong and thoughtful comments about my teaching and the course content. To address workload issues, I altered the nature of that content.In the Fall 2016 version, I incorporated poetry and drama, and while the comments about workload did not really shift, content comments were generally less fully fleshed out and detailed, suggesting less engagement. My revisions have in some ways not been effective, and as I plan future iterations of the class, I want to either incorporate more prose or revise my writing assignments to give students more freedom in essay topics while simultaneously firmly framing their topic options.

Positive student comments are very tightly organized: students like the engaging, sometimes eye-opening discussions and activities about content that they--surprisingly!--enjoy.

In Composition courses, students find helpful my willingness to improve writing and "being treated like a college student," though students do sometimes report struggling with the pace and amount of work. This is always a challenge in Composition, especially in EN101; one student writes, "I would space out the assignment dates, and give a little bit more time because the assignments were back to back and it got overwhelming at times" (Fall 2016). Additionally, students sometimes find the expectations unclear; however, other students comment that the courses are challenging in a positive way. In our Composition Program, we have common assignments; all of these assignments have detailed evaluation criteria, though not in a tabular "rubric" form. Similarly, the overlapping of assignments is a known problem, and the Program as a whole is being revised to address. Students routinely find workshops helpful--I received many happy comments about that regular component of the course.

LT-1 Courses

I teach two LT-1 courses, which in our program are "survey" courses--meaning they survey a wide range of time and genres of work. In EN203, I teach world literature from approximately 1500-1800. In En207, I teach theater history from ancient Greece to the contemporary period. In both of these courses, my method is to connect historical and aesthetic context to specific examples of major trends.

In 200-level courses, students have sometimes commented on the difficulty of the exams, but also point out that the material is compelling and the discussions, interesting. Comments about opacity have diminished since I began teaching at Marymount, as I have learned the student body and developed more specific (and tabular) rubrics. I am happy with my EN203 course, though I would like to revise my EN207 essays to be more tightly focused, as I have with EN203, and I have plans to incorporate more hands-on learning into these core survey courses.

LT-2 Courses

I teach two LT-2 courses, one at the 300 level (EN340: Major Women Writers) and two at the 400-level, each of which I have taught only once in the past six years (EN426: Studies in the Novel and EN429: Studies in Performance). I feel that a LT-2 at the 300-level is appropriate for our program with only EN102 as a prerequisite; however, I firmly believe that LT-2 courses at the 400-level should have an LT-1 prerequisite, which is not currently the case. We recently made EN490 only available to majors and minors, but our "studies" courses, like EN426, are currently available to all students who have completed EN102, resulting in a very wide range of skill levels, familiarity, and expectations. Because I have more data on EN340, I will focus here on that class, which I am actively revising in response to student comments and for higher levels of achievement.

I teach EN340 as a course that looks specifically at the fate of women's writing in literary history, focusing on issues of canonicity, reception, and cultural perceptions around women who write. I try to tie this topic in, explicitly, to students' own voices and work, as our student body is still overwhelmingly female. This theme also provides a way to discuss the culture wars, identity politics, and other issues that retain contemporary significance. One of the first assignments is a constellation of brief essays by Mary Beard, the noted classicist and Roman historian from Cambridge, who has been the subject of many misogynistic attacks on social media for pointing out, among other things, that women have long been shamed for speaking in public. This sets the tone for the class as a whole, and ties into our readings of "woke" seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers. In 2016, I innovated a Wikipedia project, and in 2017, I also incorporated an audiobook assignment; in both of these activities, a major part of my goal is to help students see that they can and do exist in the public sphere as intellectuals. As a Writing Intensive course, this gives us many opportunities, as well, to discuss public personae, writing in the public sphere, and so on. Students seem to find these assignments meaningful.

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