Mary C. Henry

It’s mid-August which means that classes start pretty soon- two weeks from Monday in this case- so it’s time to reflect on the summer and think about the year ahead. I took last week off from working at all- not that I’ve had an especially busy summer- but I have had various things going on up until August 2nd and didn’t get to go on any trips so figured a no-work-week was in order before I have to get ready for classes. When my daughter was younger we always made a point to go on a trip in the summer- to see family, visit national parks, etc. But recently my husband has been doing long trips home to help his mom and our daughter is 19 now (one year of college done!) so it hasn’t been a focus for us. My daughter went to California with a college friend to visit my mom for a week in June, so that was nice for them. I didn’t want to intrude on their friend trip so stayed home. It’s too expensive for us all to go to Kenya every year, so I skipped that trip that my husband took, too. I...

I think most of us in academia complain about teaching evaluations in one way or another and many articles have been written on the problems with student evaluation of instruction. Since we made the switch to online evaluations another problem is low response rates. Some faculty have "tricks" that they claim work: offering extra credit if a certain response rate is reached, threatening not to grade exams if a certain response rate is NOT reached, giving in-class time to fill them out. I've tried some of these but the rates are still quite low. For online classes it's even worse. So on top of the other issues with student evaluation of teaching, there may not be enough data either. At my university, they encourage us to use "multiple measures of teaching effectiveness" in the form of midterm evaluations of some kind. I have used Small Group Instructional Diagnosis several times to get feedback on what is and isn't working in classes. This semester I...