Faculty Focus

A FREE PUBLICATION FROM THE CREATORS OF THE TEACHING PROFESSOR

student feedback

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Teaching and Learning Without Grading

Imagine if faculty did not design courses, select course materials, or grade student work.  What role would faculty play in teaching and learning? We serve

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The Word “Flow” Has to Go

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s 1980 book Metaphors We Live By famously catalogued the way metaphors influence the way we think, speak, and act. Some

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student feedback

A New Twist on End-of-Semester Evaluations

Those who write about teaching persona (the slice of our identities that constitutes the “public teaching self”) encourage us to start by reflecting on the messages we want to send to students. A dialogue with ourselves is a useful beginning, but for the last days of a semester another option might be more intriguing and revealing.

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What Can We Learn from End-of-Course Evaluations?

No matter how much we debate the issue, end-of-course evaluations count. How much they count is a matter of perspective. They matter if you care about teaching. They frustrate you when you try to figure out what they mean. They haven’t changed; they are regularly administered at odds with research-recommended practices. And faculty aren’t happy with the feedback they provide. A survey (Brickman et al., 2016) of biology faculty members found that 41% of them (from a wide range of institutions) were not satisfied with the current official end-of-course student evaluations at their institutions, and another 46% were only satisfied “in some ways.”

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