Judge Me Kindly

Yesterday, I asked my students to write anonymous evaluations of my class. I asked them to tell me what has been working for them, what hasn’t, and anything else they wanted me to know. I made sure to emphasize that I wanted to know their criticisms, but I wanted to read them in a nice way, dammit, and there was no reason to make me cry. It makes me feel warmer and fuzzier than I can describe that everyone had really positive things to say, but they also gave me some really thoughtful evaluations of the things we’ve done in class. Doing this was immensely helpful, and it has made me feel a lot better, too. Why didn’t I do this sooner?

The book suggests doing this every week, though, and I do kind of feel that this would be a bit much. I feel like students would start to feel like they were repeating themselves after a while. I also think it might be hard to evaluate some of the things we do in class until the students have used the concepts on their own, like when they start writing the papers the day before they’re due. Does anyone else do evaluations every week? Is it helpful?

By the way, the one thing that students hate more than anything else is the informal writing assignments, but I knew this before I asked. I think on Monday I’ll give them a choice between doing reading quizzes and informal writing. Not that I intend to start giving quizzes; I just think they’ll appreciate informal writing more when they hear the alternative.