In “Deep in the Heart of Texas“, Stanley Fish notes that we aren’t always in the best position to judge the quality of something. We don’t always know immediately after we obtain something what its actual worth is. This is true he says for education, and why he argues against student evaluations as a measure of teaching quality. Instead we need “Deferred Judgment” to evaluate teaching because we don’t know how useful the education was right now and it might be a long while before we do know.
And that is why student evaluations are all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance: they measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with the deep efficacy of learning. Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers.
But sometimes (although not always) effective teaching involves the deliberate inducing of confusion, the withholding of clarity, the refusal to provide answers; sometimes a class or an entire semester is spent being taken down various garden paths leading to dead ends that require inquiry to begin all over again, with the same discombobulating result; sometimes your expectations have been systematically disappointed. And sometimes that disappointment, while extremely annoying at the moment, is the sign that you’ve just been the beneficiary of a great course, although you may not realize it for decades.
This got me thinking because while I agree that deferred judgment makes more sense, I would like to know my impact on the students now. I need to know a.s.a.p. because I need to make changes. Additionally, I don’t think we track students well enough to get that deferred judgment perspective. How often do we bring back 5 year alums to discuss with the faculty what worked and what didn’t (as opposed to alumni reunions that at all about fun and fund raising). This idea also scares the pants off a lot of faculty whose jobs are dependent on strong student reviews. Hopefully my dean and chair have read this article.
And what about the students? Do they understand that their work in the course might be paying dividends later, but just be confusing and a pain now? I don’t ever remember anyone helping me understand that when I was a student. No one explained that a lot of the courses I was talking were about learning to think about ideas just as much as they were about the specific ideas.
I have no conclusion or witty fix for this. Having a discussion with the students about it sounds like a step in the right direction, but if I used my class time to chat with the students about all the nuances of education I think they should know, then we would never actually get to any of the discipline.
UPDATE – (12/16/2012) “Evaluate the Evaluation: Course Evaluations and External Biases” discusses biases in course evaluations. Â More evidence it is tough to really get the impact of your teaching.