Responding to student course evaluations

There is a vast literature in education and related fields detailing the problems with student course evaluations. Evaluations have long been a seemingly necessary burden of teaching that yield questionable data for instructional improvements.

I didn't solve these problems, but I tried something different this past term: I responded to my class about the evaluations. While not a practice unique to online learning, I felt that responding provided a good way to close the communication loop in our remote (Zoom platform) online writing-intensive English course, the Literature of Business (1). 

As usual, after the term concluded and I submitted grades, I received my course evaluation results. I always read them with care and interest, and I assure my students of that several times in an effort to encourage them to take the evaluations seriously. This year, however, I added something else: I wrote them a detailed email responding to the evaluations.

I've been thinking about doing this for years, seeing it as a way of affirming for them that I read and take their comments seriously in the quest to improve my teaching. I had paused, though, on following through for various reasons, mainly because I didn't want it to appear that I was getting the last word on the students. This term, I just went for it, and I think--I hope!--I handled it well.

I bcc'ed the whole class, starting with this:

Dear students from ENGL308 The Literature of Business,
I hope the smoke has cleared from the spring term and you are into your summer plans and courses. I wanted to take a moment to respond to the assessments, ideas, and suggestions you provided in your course evaluations for our class. This is something new I am trying so you, the students, can see that I went through your evaluations carefully and thought about them. As I said, I much appreciate your input, and I want you to know that I hear you.

I noted their strong response rate, in this class 13 of 16 active students in the course. 

I then reviewed their responses to the objective, 1-to-5-scale questions. I explained the scale again and went through each question category, starting with questions about the course and moving to questions about their evaluation of their own performance to finally questions about the instructor (me!). I provided a brief summary of the numerical values in each category, trying to remain neutral in this summary (although I did thank them for what were positive responses about my teaching). 

I then summarized, using an occasional quote for illustration, their subjective comments, especially what they found "beneficial" and what needed improving.

In the end of my message, I focused on these improvement areas, writing, "Overall, these responses indicate that you were satisfied with the class and quite satisfied with my instructional efforts. However, over the summer I must think about two primary comments you made about the course": those two main areas were workload and grading.

Of workload, I wrote, "You view the workload as too heavy—and these were thoughtful comments, not complaints." Of grading, while I took the opportunity to describe how my grading of quizzes and informal writing works, I ultimately wrote, "I must continue to find ways to make the grading in my courses more transparent and fairer."

No student responded to this message, but I didn't expect that. I did want them to feel heard and to know that their comments for improving this course do not go into the void. 

Note:

1) The Literature of Business is a writing intensive course I developed. In the course, we read literary texts with business themes and complement them with non-fiction texts from business venues such as The Harvard Business Review. In most assignments, they write as the characters from the literary texts in professional genres, using the non-business texts to support their position. An example assignment is they read Melville's "Bartleby, The Scrivener" and an HBR article "How to Motivate Your Problem People" by Nigel Nicholson. They must write a letter as one of the characters in the story to a lawyer who is asking for statements about whether the boss is somehow to blame for what happens to Bartleby at the end of the story.