Thursday, October 9, 2014

It's That Time of Year

And no, I don't mean Christmas, and no, I will not support the insanity that leads retailers to put out Christmas merchandise before Halloween.
 
I mean the time of year when I get my annual review from my department chair. He observed my teaching last week, he has my student evaluations, and I filled out an eight-page self evaluation, probably giving him even more ammunition to use against me.
 
But I appreciate these reviews, because in the seven years I worked as an adjunct, I never once had a performance evaluation. In one school, I was observed every semester and met with the chair to discuss the results, but there was never any overall evaluation.
 
And why should there be? The purpose of the evaluations is to determine promotion and merit raise issues, and for most adjuncts, there is neither.
 
But they do have the student evaluations to contend with, and that is a serious problem. If it is the only tool administration uses to assess the teaching in the adjuncts' classrooms, they need to consider the reliability of the source.
 
I have always known that students don't take these evaluations seriously. Last year, in the portion asking how the class might be improved, one student wrote, "Have a petting zoo."
 
A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Vitae" leads with a case of an adjunct losing her job because of course evaluations. The article also quotations from several of my friends because, I suppose, birds with no feathers flock together.
 
You can read the whole article here.
 
Author Max Lewontin writes:  
For most tenure-track and tenured professors, course evaluations are used as guidance or feedback, a way to tweak their courses based on student concerns. At their worst, the evaluations are an annoyance, as students vent their frustrations or lament a poor grade.  
But for adjuncts, student evaluations often carry much more weight. In a way, that makes sense: Most adjuncts are, after all, hired to teach. But in the absence of other metrics or methods, many colleges use evaluations as a key means—or the only means—of determining whether to renew a contingent professor’s contract.
I have frequently gotten good tips from student evaluations. Probably the best one was that I talk too fast.

And I would like a petting zoo.
    
 

2 comments:

  1. Reindeer and musk ox are surprisingly nice for a petting zoo.

    ReplyDelete
  2. nice thought . . . and there's still time to do it this semester!

    ReplyDelete