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From time to time, we all receive negative comments from students regarding our teaching. No matter how good you are, you can’t please everyone! But sometimes we become focused on the negative aspects of our evaluations. What can we do?
No one is a perfect teacher. Teaching evaluations help us to identify areas for improvement. If you address them, today’s negative comments can become tomorrow’s positive comments!
If you have done an informal, midterm evaluation, you should summarize the comments you received for your students as soon as possible after receiving them. You can then explain some issues (for example, you may have no control over a cramped classroom). Choose one to three issues for improvement and explain to your students how you will address their concerns. Then do what you say you will. Students will appreciate knowing that you have taken their evaluations seriously enough to read and respond. That alone will likely result in better end-of-term evaluations, but better evaluations are even more likely if you actually initiate changes to respond to their concerns.
Deciding on a plan of action to respond to criticisms will both help you to feel more in control of the situation, and turns a negative into a future positive.
When dealing with qualitative comments, try making a thematic analysis. Record each general point made by each student. In brackets beside each theme, put the number of students who made the comment. For example, you might have “effective discussions (5)” or “teacher speaks too quickly (3).” Once all themes are documented, focus on the top five positive and negative comments. That will help you to put idiosyncratic comments into perspective and identify the most important areas of strength and improvement. Bonus: such a thematic analysis can be used in your teaching dossier.
Negative teaching evaluations are especially upsetting when faculty are applying for tenure and promotion. However, remember that your tenure committee does not expect you to be a perfect teacher from the very first time you teach. Instead, they will want to see evidence that you have improved your teaching over time, and that you have a plan for addressing areas for improvement.
You can contextualize negative evaluations in your teaching dossier. You can explain any mitigating circumstances that might have affected your evaluations. For example, you can cite research that shows that faculty who initiate new teaching practices often receive lower evaluations at first, until they become accomplished at it.
Discuss your evaluations with colleagues. They may help you to celebrate your successes and help put negative comments into perspective. They may help you to identify actions that will assist you in addressing students’ concerns. Sharing concerns may make you feel less isolated and unique in your anxieties.
Perhaps a significant number of your students perceive a problem with your teaching that you cannot understand. Consider researching the issue. This may include a literature review, consultation with someone at the Instructional Development Centre, or may go as far as a complete research project. Please see our section on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning for more information on how to investigate teaching and learning issues in your classroom.
Remember that it doesn’t matter so much that you received a negative comment. After all, what’s done is done. What matters is what you do about it.