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Inside Higher Education
What Students
Really Think
By Colleen Flaherty
September 12, 2016
There’s no shortage of books on how to become better college
instructor, but surprisingly few take student perspectives into
account. Not so for a new book from Michigan State University. The
product of a journalism class, To My Professor: Student Voices for
Great College Teaching (Read the Spirit Books) distills thousands of
student comments and bits of advice into a cleverly organized, timely
read. It should appeal to anyone interested in improving instruction or
simply knowing what students think, beyond the seeming randomness of
teacher rating websites or the targeted feedback in student evaluations
of teaching.
“What makes this book unique is the fact that it is written by
students,” said Meaghan Markey, an advertising major at Michigan State
who wrote or helped write sections on student parents, Hmong students
and online classes. “What we wrote isn't just theory, it's things we as
students have actually experienced. Our goal with To My Professor is to
give students a voice and for professors to hear us.”
Markey and her journalism classmates began writing the book in January.
The original idea -- as in previous iterations of the course -- was to
write a cultural competency guide for the university classroom. But it
soon evolved into something bigger: a book on contemporary teaching
informed and written largely by students. Classmates started with a
simple prompt -- "To my professor..." -- which yielded thousands of
comments through social media and other websites, along with in-person
interviews and focus groups. About half the comments came from students
at Michigan State, and half came from those elsewhere. The authors
divided that feedback into recurrent themes, eventually coming up with
chapters on topics from course structures and syllabi, student
engagement and technology to inclusion of students of all races,
cultures and abilities.
Each chapter and subsection starts with original student comments,
scrubbed for anonymity. The chapter on racial inclusion, for example,
starts with quotes including “Just because I’m black I cannot speak for
all my ‘people’” and “When your professor is so biased toward Latinas
and undermines the hardships that Asians have to go through in this
society.”
“Racial tensions can arise abruptly in the classroom,” the book reads,
summarizing student comments and relevant research. “Sometimes, the
tension is due to something an instructor says: the wrong word, an
awkward attempt at humor or a stereotype laid bare. And sometimes,
students argue about racial issues. Whatever the case, professors are
responsible for handling these conflicts. They cannot just be ignored.”
Beyond student comments, the book also includes strategies for
overcoming possible points of tension. Some of those are gleaned from
existing research, and others were solicited from master teachers and
education experts. Howard C. Stevenson, the Constance Clayton Professor
of Urban Education and a professor of Africana studies at the
University of Pennsylvania, is quoted as advising professors to take up
to 60 seconds to recalibrate a surprise confrontation about race or
culture into a constructive conversation with phrases such as “Let’s
talk about that.” Professors should take note of their emotions to
avoid injecting them into the discussion, he says, and help set ground
rules that keep the focus on students’ feelings and the issues -- not
assigning blame.
In a separate section on grades and feedback, Angela Duckworth,
Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology at
Pennsylvania and author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,
recommends that professors move the focus from grades to feedback, to
alleviate anxiety and even complaints. Duckworth says that college
students are relatively starved for feedback, because they received it
daily or weekly in a high school, and says professors should tell
students how they’re doing much more frequently.
Curious about how to engage more students? Amol Pavangadkar, a senior
teaching specialist and producer at Michigan State’s College of
Communication Arts and Sciences, looks out in his classes for
“floaters,” or those students who keep a low profile and try not to
attract any attention, good or bad. To make sure they’re involved in
class, he takes a two-pronged approach, first making them a do a public
critique of a video reel, accompanied by a graded paper, and then
scheduling one-on-one advising appointments with them. These “floaters”
are also asked to file project time and location plans with him, to
keep them on track while honoring their wishes for privacy. Pavangadkar
says these wishes sometimes come from undisclosed mental, physical or
legal issues.
Other bits of advice are relentlessly practical: don’t cancel class 15
minutes ahead of time, particularly if you have commuter students. Use
proper email etiquette, since that’s expected of students. Learn how to
pronounce students’ names, even the hard ones. Don’t just read from
tiny print on PowerPoint slides, which, according to the book, can be
“weapons of class destruction.” And while you’re at it, update your
lessons. Students notice when you’re using 2000 U.S. Census data, for
example, when the 2010 data have long been published. Make your office
hours count, starting with being available when you say you’ll be.
Each section also includes a resource guide listing research and
compendiums of best practices. But the student comments alone are
illustrative of what not to say or do. Here’s a list of not-so-greatest
hits taken from various chapters:
“I can’t believe my professor just asked this girl from Saudi Arabia if
she was a terrorist!”
“My professor just asked me if I celebrated Thanksgiving [because] I’m
Jewish. … Dude, I’m still American.”
“All migrant workers are not a ‘plague’ on America.”
“When you have a nontraditional student who has been out in the world
in one form or another, it can be slightly insulting to be treated like
you’re an 18-year-old kid wet behind the ears and just out of high
school.” (From a section on teaching veterans.)
“My math teacher said to an older student, ‘You look like you’ve seen
these units many times before.’ Holy awkward.”
“I wish professors wouldn’t assign work during class that is due by
midnight. As a first-generation student, my parents don’t have jobs
that allow for me to not work during college. I work part time to pay
for my essentials. Give me a few days to submit the assignment after
you assign it in a class.”
“When you email your professor thinking you’re going to fail a project,
and he emails you back with a Bible verse and hope. #thankyouprof.”
“My professor called Republicans ‘brain-dead.’”
“My professor knows my name and without a doubt comments on my
appearance every class. Today’s comment was ‘glammed-up homeless.’”
In case you’re wondering, not all student comments were negative. One
student quoted in a section on helping students break career-based
gender stereotypes wrote, “Thank you for recognizing that I am a
student who cares about my education, regardless of my gender,” for
example. “Thank you for always giving me a platform to speak
comfortably in class even though English is not my first language,”
wrote another in a section on nonnative speakers of English.
“Thanks for talking to the students making racist jokes, it made me
feel comfortable knowing you were on my side,” said someone else. One
more said, “As a student who is hard of hearing, it is difficult to
hear questions asked by students in lecture, so I really appreciate it
when you repeat questions to the class.”
And perhaps the winner: “One of our teachers learned Braille so that
she could teach her blind student. Amazing.”
Here’s some additional food for thought:
“My professor just made us all clap for the athletes in the class,
saying, ‘Thanks for all you do for us, you guys deserve our praise.”
“My professor knew that I have really bad anxiety, especially when it
comes to public speaking. She would warn me ahead of time if I had to
talk in class so I could prepare myself.”
“If feel that your method of teaching and your style of trying to
connect with the students is all wrong. By passing around a sheet on
the first day showing that the average grade for your class is below a
C, you made us feel like you were setting us up for failure at the
start. You knew I suffered from [attention deficit/hyperactivity
disorder], that I was struggling, but you did not care. As a professor,
you should make yourself available as much as possible to your
students. A teacher is supposed to be approachable, someone you can
trust, and you were not that.”
“My prof tells me I need to participate in class discussions more but
every time I raise my hand she never calls on me.”
Bryce Airgood, a journalism major at Michigan State and one of the
book’s student authors, said her favorite thing about To My Professor
is “that instead of just assuming what students had issues with in
regards to professors, we actually asked them and got their viewpoints.”
Joe Grimm, an editor in residence at Michigan State and the faculty
lead on the book, called the student perspective its “secret sauce.”
“Most of the literature on teaching comes from master teachers or
administrators or people like that,” Grimm said. Yet students have
valuable feedback, as well, he added. “They are all adults, and, after
all, they’re consumers of this product -- that’s sort of my line.
Saying that students can’t evaluate teaching is kind of like saying
that diners can’t evaluate their meals.”
At the same time, Grimm acknowledged common criticisms that student
evaluations of teaching at the end of a course can catch the attention
of the “grumpiest” students. And comments on such websites at
RateMyProfessors.com tend to be “highly anecdotal,” he said.
In contrast, Grimm said, the comments quoted in To My Professor aren’t
necessarily aimed at any one professor in any one course, and the
question -- What do you want your professor to know? -- is highly
open-ended. Of course there was some “venting,” he said, but that
doesn’t mean it’s not ultimately constructive.
“If you tell the class, ‘Fraternity students never study and party all
the time,’ students in the class who are Greeks might think the
professor thinks that applies to them.”
Grimm said he reminded his students that they were writing the book out
of “love, not vengeance,” to a fill a gap in the teaching literature.
“Sometimes you do things wrong not because you’re a horrible person but
because you’re unprepared for a situation, and you blunder your way
through it.”
Grimm said the comments over all reveal expectations of respect and
civility from professors -- something that wasn’t necessarily the case
in generations past. Students want quick turnarounds on email
communications, for example, he said.
“Today’s college students think, ‘I’m not just going to give you
respect because you’re my professor,’” he said. “Some professors really
reject that, but my thinking is, ‘If that’s reality, then we’ve got to
deal with it.’”
Stephen Yelon, a professor emeritus of counseling, special education
and educational psychology at Michigan State, contributed to and helped
edit To My Professor. He said the overall message is one of “mutual
respect.” That doesn’t mean kowtowing to students, he said, but rather
helping them learn to engage respectfully with faculty members and
peers.
He regularly solicited student feedback throughout his career, he said,
and it made him a better teacher. Students tended to like his
illustrative examples of discussion points, he said, so he kept giving
them. Students also tended to say he talked too fast, so he slowed down.
“The main principles that I take from the text -- to be a fine college
teacher, from students' points of view -- be concerned about all
students' learning, be respectful of students, get to know all
students, their individual differences and the cultures,” he said.
“Study the art and science of teaching. Improve your teaching.”
Read this and other articles at Higher Education News
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