If you find yourself in the position of representing your student ratings to someone else, be prepared to:
- Provide additional information from other sources in order to create a more complete picture of your teaching effectiveness.
Assess your teaching on a continuing basis and from multiple perspectives (that is, not just at the end of the course with a single instrument) so that you are prepared to present a more complete picture of your teaching effectiveness.
- Provide your own interpretation of your student ratings.
Rather than letting the numbers stand by themselves, provide your own contextual information, your own analysis of trends and patterns, and your own conclusions about lessons that you can learn from the data that is available.
- Show what you have learned from student feedback.
If student ratings have helped you identify areas for improvement, show what you have learned from the ratings and how they have helped you make changes in your teaching.
Changes might include different approaches to teaching, and might also include different ways of addressing student perceptions in order to help them see how they can learn most effectively from a course.
Implications
Be proactive in identifying other sources of data for assessment of your teaching so that you already have the data on hand when you are working on interpreting your student ratings.
Begin to develop a Teaching Portfolio to document of your teaching over time. In addition to course outlines and lecture notes that you might use in future courses, keep student feedback data, samples of student learning, notes from peer or colleague review, and a record of your own reflections on the course while you are teaching it.
Use your student ratings to prepare you for future courses rather than only as a window on what happened in a previous course.
