How do I love thee, teaching?
Let me count the ways
Data
This dataset includes:
97 Teaching Evaluation questionnaires filled out by Vanderbilt University undergraduate and graduate student respondents for 7 courses I have co-taught from the last five years, 2018-2023.
Approach
Teaching Evaluations are respected metrics that academic institutions use to assess the caliper of their teaching.
Any true assessment of a teacher should center the voices of their students.
Methods
A qualitative methods approach that uses Likert scale data from one section of the questionnaire and written feedback for constant comparative coding from another.
How effective is my overall teaching?
Overall, my students gave me a 4.6 average out of 5 possible points on the quality and effectiveness of my teaching. Notably, this is more than one standard deviation above the average score for Vanderbilt faculty, which is 3.2.
In what ways did my students connect with me?
Section meetings—hands-on sessions—were most impactful for students.
55% of my responders also relied on digital connection via email, Zoom, Brightspace, Mural, Padlet, Perusall, or another class website.
41% of my students connected with me one-on-one in person, either during class or in my standing office hours.
How do students describe me as a teacher?
The 63 written comments fall into six key categories, shown here with size corresponding to the number of words written by students in each category.
Students wrote about my ability to keep them engaged with short lectures, insightful discussions, and content expertise. They noted my deconstruction of complex concepts, passion for learning, and responsiveness as highlights of learning with me. Many included generally positive remarks about what it was like to work with me (one called me “a generally cool person” so that became the category header for similar remarks).
Kind Words from Past Learners
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Kind Words from Past Learners 〰️
A THOUGHTFUL GIVER OF FEEDBACK
“She always gave great feedback both in class and on assignments!”
“Emma gives thoughtful feedback.”
“She always gave incredible feedback during class.”
“The feedback she gave on homework was helpful to understand what students could do to improve scores.”
“Comments Emma made when listening in on conversations were so helpful and thoughtful!”
“She also provided outstanding written feedback.”
“Feedback on assignments was specific, constructive, and helpful.”
“I really benefitted from the feedback I got from Emma. You can always improve your writing and thinking by reading her feedback. Emma asked questions to help discover many ways of improving.”
AN ACCESSIBLE COMMUNICATOR
“Emma was very helpful and her response time to emails was always very quick.”
“Emma was always quick to respond to an email”
“Emma was helpful and really responsive!”
“She was very accessible outside the classroom!”
“She was very approachable and accessible in and out of class, giving helpful and branching insights through the class zoom and her additions within discussions.”
AN ENGAGING INSTRUCTOR
“She always adds an engaging style to her presentations.”
“Emma was constantly engaging with the group material and students themselves”
“Emma did cool activities with us.”
“The mini–lectures were informative and engaging.”
“She brought a different perspective to discussions and always pushed our thinking forward when she joined our small groups.”
“All of her mini–lectures were really interesting!”
“Her focus on the global projects in lecture really helped to contextualize what we were learning about in class and apply it to current events.”
“Her presentations were really informative to me and I thought they were really interesting.”
“Emma facilitated many of our discussions and asked great questions that probed me to think about something in a new way.”
“I appreciated how involved Emma was throughout this class. On some days, she would lead the class through the lesson for the day, and she always did an excellent job presenting and interacting with the class.”
“The PowerPoints were excellent.”
“Emma showed understanding, demonstrated flexibility, and had a genuine interest in the students in our class.”
“Emma is tremendous at asking probing questions.”
A JARGON DECODER
“Emma gave excellent explanations of high level content in smaller, more digestible chunks”
“Her explanations of challenging concepts were really effective!
“She’s great at grounding concepts in examples”
“Emma was truly helpful in clarifying course material.”
“Emma was able to explain and converse in a way that was easy to understand, well–informed, and supportive to my learning of course content.”
“She was great at distilling the week's content and connecting concepts to some of the institutions we are all a part of”
“She gave clear instructions as well as to what would be expected”
“She provided scaffolds for assignments and relevant experiences/examples from practice”
“Emma really helped break concepts down for me so that they were more simple and easy to understand.”
“She was engaging and did a good job explaining terms and concepts that were needed for the discussion.”
A CONTENT-AREA EXPERT
“Emma provided guidance for using novel technologies.”
“Emma taught us about discourse analysis and led us through our own analysis of a video that she had recorded. She was also very knowledgeable about content in the class and ready to provide helpful thoughts and ideas as we learned.”
“Emma was very knowledgeable about the subject and had great advice when it came to research since she recently completed a similar project to the one we were working on herself.”
“Emma helped improve the course over time.”
“Emma even helped me make some community connections.”
“She is very familiar with the course goals and topics, and so was effective.”
“It was very clear that Emma had a really complete understanding of the material”
“Her knowledge on the topic was helpful.”
“I loved when she would bring in different tech tools and examples for us to view and discuss.”