Monday, April 23, 2007
Soon to be teaching
Here I am, living the final days of my college career as simply a student. When I come back to school in the fall, I will be a student and an instructor—taking classes and leading classes. This is not a particularly insightful revelation on my part; it’s just very exciting (I’ve never taught a class) and very scary (I’ve never taught a class). Even though I think I lack enough experience to teach effectively, I know that I cannot gain that experience without teaching my first class. I also know that I have more teaching experience than any of my English 1000 students (or even than I did at the beginning of this semester), having sat in class meetings for years and having taken English 8010. Therefore, I might perceive my own preparedness more disparagingly than my students will. I appreciate Anne Curzan and Lisa Damour for making this point—that “students will generally respect your authority no matter how you feel about your qualifications as a teacher” (6). I also appreciate Curzan and Damour for suggesting how to improve teaching before the end-of-the-semester evaluations come out—through midterm evaluations. I think this could be a good idea, and I might use it in my section. It might work well if students know the week prior that they should come to class ready to evaluate the course thus far. I question whether students will be comfortable evaluating my performance, knowing I grade their work. Can they be candid in this situation? How can I come closer to ensuring that my students evaluate the course honestly? Any thoughts?
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5 comments:
Andrew,
I'm pretty sure the online midterm evaluation MoCAT system is entirely anonymous. Or otherwise, if it isn't automatically, it can be. There's a web link that you can go to as soon as you know when/what section(s) you'll be teaching (maybe you have to wait until you get your class list, but I don't think so) and you can set up an account. You can either use their standard evaluation form or come up with your own questions.
Andrew,
I may not be speaking to what you're asking when you question whether students will be comfortable evaluating you and/or the course mid-term, but if you use MoCat as Katie is talking about, you can stress to students that their answers are confidential (which they are) and the research shows that the feeling will be faciliated by the fact that they do the evaluation on their own time, away from class.
I went to that "Things I Wish I Would've Known About Teaching" seminar last week and it was basically run by the grad school (George Justice) and ET@MO, so there was a lot on MoCat. The seminar made me a believer. You can tailor the questions any way you want (or you can use a pre-existing template or a combination of the two); so you can phrase your questions in such a way that they ask students for feedback on specific topics (how time is spent in class, if they feel they understand assignments, etc.). ET@MO's crunched the numbers, and they show that students actually write more (like twice as much) with MoCat than with paper forms because they do it when they have time to write well thought out responses. They also appreciate being able to give feedback when it still can affect the course while they themselves are still in it, instead of only after the fact as a "favor" to the next group who takes the class and/or the instructor.
It looks like Katie beat me to the punch by a few seconds, but here's a link--maybe the one she's thinking of:
http://etatmo.missouri.edu/eventsservices/mocat.htm
MoCAT is very user friendly-- as a part of my grad school assistantship this year I set up surveys for about 40 international teaching assistants, and was able to make templates for each type of class they taught. It's simple.
One other comment on Andrew's post--regarding whether or not he knows enough to effectively teach--I think he's correct in that only the experience of teaching will make you an effective teacher. I want to point out as well that I've discovered from experience that you don't really know a subject until you've taught it to others.
Court and Katie should have MoCat pom poms. Wow, I have no idea how to spell pom poms.
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