Thursday, May 3, 2012

Here and Now had a good piece this morning about teacher evaluations. Professor Muhammad Zaman at Boston University has his students evaluate his class and his teaching every 2 weeks. What do you think?  Should we be inviting feedback from our students more often during the semester?  What do you do in your classes?

1 comment:

Lee said...

I think it is one of the best practices because you can feel the pulse of your students in a more accurate and timely manner, and you show your students that you care. I used to do an end-of-class wrap up asking my students to write down what they learned from the class that day and what they were still unclear about. The once-a-semester evaluation done at the end of the term will help us improve only in the subsequent semester. So Prof. Zaman's biweekly evaluations are better, in my view.

Of course, in my opinion, an effective teacher should not only be kind but also be firm and demand student responsibility for their own learning and improvement as well. It takes a kind of a symbiotic bonding between the teacher and the students for the whole class to really focus on what is best for the students.

Lee