Podcast #72: Course Evaluations with Betsy Barre

Kevin Gannon is the director of the Center of Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, and he’s also a Professor of History. Many of our listeners may know him from his articles in the Chronicle of Higher Ed or his popular Twitter feed where he writes about teaching, dogs, race, politics, and seemingly whatever else is on his mind. In this episode we dig deep on Kevin’s personal teaching journey and learn how he came to be the teacher he is today and what kind of teacher he aspires to be in the future.

The evidence is clear that when students work actively in the classroom, they learn more. It's also true that most of the classrooms we teach in were designed for a professor to lecture to a group of students that sit passively and take notes. What do classrooms designed for active learning look like? Do students learn more when we teach in active learning classrooms? And what other impacts might teaching in active learning classrooms have on students and instructors? Robert Talbert, a math professor and education researcher at Grand Valley State University, recently took a deep dive into the literature on these questions, and in this episode he shares what he's learned.

Our guest today, Doug Robertson, is one of the best teachers on the planet. He teaches 4th grade at Powell Valley Elementary School outside Portland, Oregon, and you might know him from his multiple interviews and podcasts, his books, his YouTube channel, or maybe his incredibly entertaining Twitter stream. While we usually focus on higher ed on the show, we had a great conversation with Doug about how we apply the fundamental principles of teaching in our respective classrooms.

This fall Doug and Edward both taught classes of their own. In their latest episode, they reflect on their challenges, what they tried, and what they learned.

Jose Vasquez has been teaching economics at the University of Illinois for 14 years. He teaches one of the largest introductory microeconomics classes in the world every semester with more than 900 students. He also teaches one of the biggest intro micro MOOC’s in the world: His Coursera course has had more than 100,000 students register in the last five years. He thinks deeply about how best to use his class time and what he wants students to do outside class. Our conversation covers a wide range as Jose explains what still excites him about teaching and how he got to where he is. Among other things, we talk about the joys of active learning, the importance of motivating our students, and the benefits (and costs) of peer assessment.

Justin Cerenzia teaches history at St George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island. We don’t usually have guests from high schools on the show, but Justin is no ordinary high school teacher. He’s also the director of the school’s teaching center and someone who pays keen attention to research on pedagogy across the board. In this episode we talk to Justin about how teaching methods and ideas being popularized in STEM fields can translate to the humanities.

Outside observers can give instructors valuable formative feedback, and with the right observers and the right instruments, classroom observation can also be a useful (if incomplete) measure of teaching quality. Our guest, Marilyne Stains, teaches in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln where she specializes in chemical and science education. She has used a range of measures of instructor and student behavior in her research and recently co-authored the largest-ever study of STEM teaching practices that analyzed classroom observation data for more than 2,000 classes. In this episode, we discuss the pros and cons of a variety of classroom observation techniques from reliable objective measures like COPUS to completely unstructured note-taking.

Monroe Weber-Shirk has taught engineering at Cornell for 24 years, and in 2005 he started the AguaClara Cornell program where he works closely with local partners, graduate students, and up to 80 undergraduates at a time. Together they develop, implement, and maintain sustainable water treatment facilities in multiple developing countries. It's an incredible model of deeply engaged learning at scale, and in this episode Monroe tells us how it works and how he got here.

Mac Stetzer from the University of Maine Physics Department is an active physics education researcher with lots of experience teaching teachers how to teach physics better. In this episode he shares his lessons learned working with undergraduate learning assistants, graduate student teaching assistants, and teachers at the K-12 level.

Everyone has an opinion about course evaluations, but most of these opinions are based on personal anecdotes and armchair speculation. Our guest in this episode is Betsy Barre, author of several articles reviewing the literature on what's right and what's wrong with course evaluations. Betsy is currently an Associate Director at Rice University's Center for Teaching Excellence, and in May 2018 she will move on to become the Executive Director of the Teaching and Learning Collaborative at Wake Forest University. We cover a lot of ground during our conversation about this important and complex topic.