“Student ratings…[are] like flashlights. That is, they illuminate only the teaching skills and abilities that fall within their beams.” – from “The Teaching Portfolio”, by Peter Seldin
At the end of each semester, students are given the chance to provide anonymous evaluations of several aspects of the learning environment in NC State’s ClassEvals. These comments cannot possibly cover the entire range of what happens in a classroom. However, I do think that some of the comments that have been left are particularly poignant, and wanted to include a few of them here, as they provide anecdotal evidence for some of the things I strive to do in my classroom. I have tried to pick out comments representative of five major themes I have observed. It is clear from these that students will pick up on what a teacher brings to the classroom.
For authenticity’s sake, I have left comments in their original form, typos and all, but have bolded phrases that stood out for me.
1. My enthusiasm/excitement for geology carries over to my students.
I was not required to take this class, but I came in the first day of class and decided to stay. This was all because of my instructor. She is so awesome and so enthusiastic. She made me want to learn. She was so supportive and amazing and I wish that I could take her for other courses. I have recommended her to everyone that I know.
Katherine was always really excited about geology and it made me more excited about it. She gave us more than enough resources to help with our quizzes and even gave us study flashcards for MEA 101. She has been the best TA out of all my other TAs that I have had. I learned alot form this class.
2. I am willing to go the extra mile for my students.
Katherine is a great teacher! She was always excited to teacher and made the course fun and really took the time to teacher it. Katherine would also go out of her way to make sure everyone understood the information and really cared about all the students!
She loved coming to class, which made me love coming too. She made the course interesting, and found different ways to help understand the material.
3. I am able to reach students with diverse learning needs.
She was very enthusiastic about the subject and seems to enjoy teaching it. She was very understanding of how difficult a topic some things in geology can be for non-geology majors and was always willing to help out with labs. She answered emails fast when we had questions and provided us with the most tools she could not only for our lab exams but for the exams in the course.
Ms. Almquist was a great instructor for my GEO Lab. Not having taken the lecture in 4 years she really made the material recent and helped everyone out along the way. She explains the material very well and brings a lot of energy to a 9 am lab.
especially helpful to reinforce principles as i was a 601 student
4. Students do not expect geology to be fun or challenging, and are surprised by how much they learn and enjoy it
I really appreciate Katherine's enthusiasm and energy. She brought life to what can be a boring subject.
Katherine is very upbeat and obviously is very passionate about geology and that helps to keep us engaged and interested. Her "schist" and "gneiss" jokes along with countless others helped me remember rock names and to actually think that a geologist could perhaps have a personality because (no offense) but sometimes it can seem pretty boring:) Overall, I believe Katherine was a great T.A. who prepared us well for quizzes and tests--the emails with possible quiz questions/topics helped alot!
This instructor truly loves her job and you can tell by going to class everyday. She helped whenever my group needed direction. The class itself was more difficult than I expected but the instructor helped me every step of the way.
5. I emphasize hands-on learning of concepts over details.
The instructor was really passionate and knowledgeable about geology, and this made the class more interesting. She was very willing to help students in their pursuit of geology; it wasn't just about the grade and that showed. I felt as if she had personal interest in each of us and she went above and beyond to help us, offering office times for the lecture portion and setting up a study group for the exam (none of which she had to do). I feel very lucky to have her as my lab instructor.
This course including interesting labs that I enjoyed doing. They were challenging but I enjoyed getting to work hands on with what we were learning.
She is very enthusiastic about this course which encourages her students to be enthusiastic as well! she tries very hard to convey the information to make sure that everyone really understands the concepts.
I liked the field trips. It was nice to get out of the classroom and see what we were learning about in real life as opposed to lab manuals or just lab samples of rocks.
Other ClassEval themes, and my response
A. The way the labs are written
The first two semesters with our old lab manual, I received many comments like these:
“The lab manual is poorly written and has poor instructions.”
“The labs weren't always written well, but our teacher explained them and rewrote them, when necessary.”
After the lab was re-designed, comments shifted towards ones like this:
“This lab completely rocked (pun intended :)). The material facilitated my knowledge of geology. It was challenging, pertinent, relevant, and applicable to the real world. The labs were well designed, fun, and varied. They worked very well with the lecture in giving me the complete base.”
B. The lab midterm and final
Some students struggled the first semester the individual midterm and final were used in the lab:
“Although I understand the concept of a lab to be a hands on experience that helps tie together hands on activities with concepts learned in class, I do not think this lab was very beneficial. I do not believe that a lab should have a midterm or final exam. I think this material should be tought in the lecture and tested in that classroom. I believe that the lab should only be in place to help understand the lecture better with hands on activities.”
“I would suggest that the fact that there is a mid-term exam and a final be emphasized more. Most lab courses at State do not have finals and so I don't think that a lot of students took them very seriously and knew how much they were weighted. The review sessions were very helpful and I think they should definitely continue.”
After getting these comments, I made sure to take the time to discuss the reasons behind testing, best study practices, and provided my own review sheet to help provide focus. Each semester after that, this review sheet included questions the students came up with at the end of each lab. I use initials to identify the student who had written the question, which students told me made them feel like they knew what they were doing. I feel that this was an important step in encouraging academic self-esteem. I did not get any more comments about the assessments, though it was clear that many students still struggled with them. I think that this was because students were taking more responsibility for their learning and were able to make the connection between lecture and lab.
My two all-time favorite comments
These are my favorite comments for very different reasons. The first is the kind of feedback every teacher loves to get. The second inspired a lot of personal reflection.
“Katherine was such a great instructor for the MEA 110 course that it has inspired me to look into the geology field as a minor are at least some type of archeology program to coincide with a major in history. That definitely says something when the instructor of the lecture course can't even do that.”
Sure enough, one of my students from this class went on to earn a minor in geology. Despite the large number of students who go through our intro courses, we don’t have many stay for a follow-up course. I have been fortunate enough to have several students stay in the department for majors and minors, several of whom still come to me for advising. Having this student’s motivation for continuing her studies explicitly tied back to my lab is such a joy.
2. Childlike giddiness annoys strongly anyone over 7-years-old.
Strikingly different from the comment above, this feedback came the second semester I taught MEA 110. In the years that have followed, it remains one of my most memorable. In the 197 comments I have received, “enthusiasm” has been included in 37 (~19%) of them, and this is the only time it was treated as a negative. Nevertheless, it inspired me to look at my energy as a tool in the classroom, and to focus on using it for maximum learning gains. I now let students know from the start that I’m going to show up to each class excited and enthusiastic about the material at hand, because it’s what I enjoy doing. I let students know that if my energy gets in the way of their learning needs, there are other sections of the lab, and I won’t be offended if they want to enroll in one of those instead.
Out of curiosity, I added a question to my ClassEvals: “How does the instructor’s level of energy and enthusiasm impact the engagement of the class?”
“At least for me it made me more excited about geology as well. I think the atmosphere of excitement she created made other students in my class more in tune to the material as well. At the beginning of the year she apologized for enthusiasm, but I think it is one of her greatest assets. So many teachers do not have that, and it ALWAYS makes me enjoy the class more when teachers love what they teach. It validates the information for me. I heard other students also say that it was refreshing.”
Physical Geology…like a drink of cool (ground)water!