🚀 go-pugleaf

From: Dennis R. Hall
Professor of English / Director of Composition
Phone: (502)588-6801

   As a fifteen-year veteran of "student evaluations" and currently director
of composition, I have seen a light ton of these student responses to courses
and teachers. I think it worth noting that the evaluation of teaching ought
to be done by one's academic peers, one's colleagues. And the evaluation
should be based on a variety of materials of which the student responses
(as I prefer to call them) are but one: syllabus, handouts, peer visitation
of classes, discussion with the teacher, teacher's self-evaluation (or report
on what he or she is about and why), and the other records that routinely
accumulate in any complex organization. The student responses become
problematic when laziness or puddenheadedness leads to relying on these
alone. And I think the student reposnes ought to be both discursive and
to a set of relevant quesions. No student response form is perfect, even
very satisfactory. But to not seek student responses to EVERY course is
to my mind a mistake for the students, the program, and the teachers. There
is useful, helpful, information to be got from them, but it remains dumb
data until it is contextualized and carefully "read."
      --Dennis Hall
        University of Louisville