Last
year I promised myself I would not subject myself to reading the consumer
surveys that have replaced student evaluations. As I have said in previous blog
entries, they rarely offer much worth knowing at the same time they actively encourage
consumer attitudes and behaviors. “What
did you like best?” is an appropriate question at Baskin-Robbins with its
multitude of flavors. It’s acontextual at best and irrelevant at worst in an
educational setting and produces responses with very little insight.
But
consumer surveys are the common practice of former universities which have largely
surrendered their role as institutions of "higher learning," to quote Thorsten Veblen.
They have sold their souls to the business quadrant Talcott Parsons
described nearly a century ago which, as Juergen Habermas accurately
predicted four decades ago, has now almost completely colonized the lifeworld.
Given
that reality, those of us who now facilitate credit attainment at these working
credential factories that have replaced universities have little choice but to
read these surveys and take them seriously simply because our management, with
control over our paychecks and work assignments, does, even as we learn little
of value from them.
Violating the Prime Directive
The
results of my latest round of surveys were predictable: there is too much work, the grading is too tough, the comments are too
harsh. The rather mindless mantra of educational technocrats today is that
patterns of comments must be taken seriously because they somehow offer
important insights simply because they are repeated. But patterns of whining
remain whining. In years past they were seen as predictable responses from
adolescents working on maturing into adults. In today’s corporate university we
treat them as divine revelation.
Of
course, such comments are predictable when one sees themselves as consumers. The
prime directive of the corporate university is to meet consumer demands while
churning out credentialed workers. The ultimate values of consumerism are
convenience and comfort, getting the most bang for one’s buck. The presumption
is that when one pays tuition, that somehow entitles them to dictate the terms
of the course – content, pedagogy, feedback and grading.
Those
values are well illustrated by one of the comments from my Christianity class
survey (in which only ¼ of the students actually bothered to respond): “Structure it like a normal course. The
workload and the strict timeline with no lenience defeats the purpose of an
online class.” Clearly “the purpose of an online class” is to
insure that the consumer must be assigned very little work that they can complete
whenever they wish.
That’s
hardly surprising given the context in which this same consumer took this
course: “I did well in the course but it
poorly affected my other responsibilities.” Translation: This course was
an afterthought. I took it for credit toward graduation but it was always a lower
priority than anything else in my life.
Real
classes which actually assign work, require meeting deadlines and hold students
accountable for their performance (or lack thereof) violate the ultimate values
of consumerism: convenience and comfort.
In the American religion of narcissistic
consumerism, classes like mine amount to blasphemy.
Taking Us Seriously
I
was particularly struck by this comment from the same class: “[T]he teacher has made it clear in his blog
that he does not care about feedback from students and that these evaluations
will not change the way he teaches.” Of
course, I am pleased that a student would actually take the time to read my
blog even if they misinterpret what I have to say here. This response should
evidence the fact that I do read student responses and take them as seriously
as the circumstances permit. And while I’d guess that she won’t be back to read
this reply, nonetheless, I’d like to clarify this misunderstanding.
As
a veteran teacher of nearly 30 years at the college level, I have always valued
the feedback of my students. I ask for it on a regular basis in the assignments
in the class. I read all the discussion posts and written assignments I make
and usually offer responsive comments to them. I maintain virtual office hours
nightly in my online classes and in-person office hours for my face-to-face
classes. I repeatedly encourage students to ask their questions even as I am
prone to point out to a number of the online students that the questions they
pose actually reveal the fact that they are not living into their part of the
bargain by reading the course site documents which have already answered those
questions.
I strongly
agree with this critic that “a good teacher…would learn as much from his
students as his students learn from him” though she reveals her ultimate
concern here when she adds “A good teacher is constantly looking for ways to
improve his teaching methods so that
students will feel good about learning.” One must never lose sight of the ultimate
consumer values: comfort and convenience.
The
reality is that when those who take these classes enter them with the
presumption that they are students with obligations to the learning process as
well as their fellow members of the learning community, they often do have much of
value to offer a good teacher. When they enter with the presumption that they
are consumers entitled to dictate the terms of engagement, they have little to
say worth hearing.
A
good teacher is concerned about workload but does not think that the Carnegie
Unit rule of two hours of prep for one hour of class is excessive regardless of
how much time a student wants to devote to it. A good teacher knows that posing
questions that stretch students’ preexisting understandings outside their
comfort zones is not sadistic, it’s called creating the teachable moment. A
good teacher understands that drawing a bead on misconceptions and prejudices
is not a lack of respect for the student’s right to form opinions and express
them, it’s taking that right and the responsibilities that flow from it –not to
mention one’s role as teacher - very
seriously.
A Text Without a Context….
In
all of my courses I have sought to engage students in a critical process of
learning. That historically has begun with a hermeneutical lens assignment to
help students recognize what they bring to the learning process. The most
common comment I get on that exercise is simply “I’d never thought about this
before.”
At
the other end of my courses, I have historically used a Student Self-Evaluation
of Engagement instrument I designed myself. It requires students to reflect
upon their own preparation, presence, engagement, consideration of others and
honesty in the course. It provides students an opportunity to grade themselves
on a standard numerical scale (5 = excellent, 0 = awful) but more importantly
asks students to explain their responses in each of the categories and then to
tell me if the grade those numbers add up to truly reflects their performance
in the class and why or why not.
In
years past when teachers passed out Xeroxed surveys and bubble sheets in class for
students to evaluate faculty, I gave students this self-evaluation prior to their
evaluating me. The point of this procedure was to contextualize the ensuing
student evaluation of the instructor. A basic consideration in contracts law is
that before one can evaluate the performance of another in a contract, one must
first assess one’s own performance. Failure to perform one’s own part of the
bargain is always a defense in any action against the other party.
Dirty Data Done Dirt Cheap
With
the advent of computerized Student Perceptions of Instruction, a number of
changes occurred. First, most students stopped participating. In years past,
many students came to the final class to be able to participate in these
evaluations and participation rates ranged from 75-95% of students still
attending class. In my most recent set
of evaluations, I had one class in which exactly 50% of the students
participated. In the remaining classes the rates ranged from 20 – 35%.
Were
this a random survey, such results might be sufficient to provide an ideal type
of teacher performance. But the respondents here are self-selected, some with
axes to grind. Students who have long since stopped attending class or coming
to the website knowing they’re failing still have an opportunity to offer feedback
on a class they haven’t engaged. Survey sites open a good three weeks before
classes even end so the entire course may not be evaluated. And in the end, the
majority of students are not heard from at all by their own decision to opt
out.
So,
while this procedure clearly produces data, what does the data really tell us
that is reliable, i.e., that is worth knowing? And so, student critic, how
seriously should an instructor take
such “feedback?”
Baskin-Robins Comes to Town
A
second change that has occurred is a decided turn towards consumerism in the
content and tenor of the questions. When students are asked about text book
selection, assignments, assessments and presentation of the course content,
they are being asked questions of pedagogy. This is a skill for which virtually
none of them have any experience upon which to draw as a well-timed question
would immediately reveal: “Upon what basis do you offer these comments?”
Worse
yet, the tenor of their responses is set by the few open-ended questions posed:
What did you like best about the course
and how the instructor taught it? Does that mean that a course students
like is necessarily a good course? Does it mean that teaching and learning occurred?
How so? Does it mean that if students didn’t like the course, it was necessarily
not a good course? That teaching and learning did not occur? Because?
And which of the 39 flavors at
Baskin-Robin today did you like the best, sir?
Without
any kind of contextualization, the comments that result from such consumerist
questions are largely irrelevant to serious pedagogical decision making. And
this is the crying shame of this shift from evaluations that bore some
semblance of useful feedback for instructors to computerized consumer surveys that
tell them very little worth knowing. Without context, these responses cannot be
taken seriously by anyone seeking to actually teach a course to students
actually intent on learning.
When
we ask students about the textbook, the obvious follow up questions should simply be “What
criteria should be used to select the course textbook?” When we ask them
about workload, the obvious next question should be “So, how much work is reasonable? And how did you arrive at that
figure?” When we ask them about the quality of a teacher’s performance in a
class, some obvious questions should immediately ensue: What is your criteria for assessing an instructor’s performance? Upon
what basis did you formulate that criteria? What was your own performance in
the class? How did it affect your perception of the instructor’s performance?
These
are questions students are actually capable of answering and providing feedback
that could be taken seriously. But in a consumer-driven technocratic process,
they will never be asked such things even as instructors will be coerced into taking
the meaningless data the current surveys produce seriously. And this is the
saddest part of this story.
Heeding the News
As
I poured out my heart the other night to a dear friend who has worked for years
as an adjunct, my friend was very matter of fact: “Look, Harry, it’s just a
job. And if they make it impossible to do the job you are capable of doing and
think you should be doing, give them what they want. Ultimately it’s all they
deserve.” It was painful to hear that advice. But I recognize the grim truth in
it. And I think I’m going to heed that news.
If
instructors are going to be penalized when consumers do not get what they want,
as now happened with me several times, the only rational response contingent workers
like myself can make is to take seriously the demands of those consumers. If
they think there’s too much work, cut the work load. If they think the quizzes that
don’t give them time to go look up the answers in the reading they haven ‘t actually
done are unfair, give them more time. Let them cheat with abandon. If they don’t
like your feedback on their writing assignments, simply don’t assign any
whenever possible. And if they are unhappy about their grades, make sure
everyone gets a good one if humanly possible. Remember, this is the generation
in which everyone gets a trophy.
The customer may not always be right,
but they’re always the customer.
A Quaint Notion Dies
A
recent article
in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported a speech by the head of TargetX,
a Customer Relationship Management firm, to a gathering of college admissions
officers. The article began by warning “Squeamish romantics found of quaint
words like ‘learning’ be warned.” He
went on to say that “institutions must think more like businesses, with
customers to please, customer-service to enhance.”
Clearly,
my experience is hardly confined to the local Factory where I toil. It is the
new reality of what used to be called higher education. And those of us “romantics”
who still cling to hopes of actually teaching people actually interested in that
quaint process of learning will eventually be swept away by this new tidal
wave. Indeed, as the retirement counselor I spoke with recently revealed, the
only reason more folks my age aren’t yet talking about retirement is simply
because they can’t pay for their medical insurance on the meager pensions the
state of Florida is going to give them.
Socrates wept.
As
we were leaving the other night, my friend reminded me, “If this is going to be
a meaningless process anyway, why fight it?”
Why,
indeed.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The
Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div., Ph.D.
Member,
Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest,
Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Asst.
Lecturer: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University
of Central Florida, Orlando
If the unexamined life is not worth
living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is
not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend
themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
