β Scribed by John A. Centra
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Titles are sometimes the only thing that people remember about what they read. This conclusion was reached about ten years ago at the first of these conferences on student ratings and faculty evaluation at Temple University. I used the title "The Student as Godfather" and talked about the impact of student ratings on academia. People remembered the title but not much of what was said. Perhaps a more memorable title for this chapter would be "The Joy of Evaluating Teaching." Or, taking the notion a step farther, maybe some subtitles should be included that would fix in the reader's memory important parts of the content. So, using variations of movie titles, I could add the subtitle "Ordinary Ratings" to stress that student ratings provide only one view of teaching and that we must be wary of their limitations. Another subtitle might be "The Faculty Strikes Back" to suggest that faculty have often felt that they should play a larger role in evaluating their colleagues. A third subtitle might be "Close Encounters of the Worst Kind," implying that there are problems with ratings based on classroom visitations when such information is used for personnel decisions. The fourth subtitle could be lifted from the original movie without variation: "Raging Bull." It would reflect the absurdity of 47 L. M. Aleamoni (mi.). Techniques p E w l d i n g and Improving In.sfnution.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES