Ryan Fowler (Franklin and Marshall College)
This year the faculty my university at has voted to move some of their long-term visiting faculty into more stable Teaching Professor (TP) positions. The process of applying to becoming a TP requires a set of student-evaluation-centered narratives based on previously taught courses. Since many TP faculty have never written a student-evaluation narrative, this conference paper will take a determined, specific form, including an evaluation of future data analysis.
In short, my plan is to identify and discuss a—potentially negative—pattern in my evaluations for a particular course. Having looked back at the body of evaluation data provided by students, I will search for opportunities to correct teaching practices that do not reflect my values as well as I would like, or that are somehow problematic from the perspective of my past students. The second part of the paper will discuss how exactly I plan to address the pattern when I teach the course (or other courses, potentially) in the future. The paper will be procedural in part because it will focus on the administrative process of creating a self-reflective, student-evaluation-centered narrative, but primarily it will discuss my own ways of reading, assessing, analyzing, and addressing my teaching practices, based directly on student perceptions of my teaching, in order to discover how to transform past “mistakes” into new, more self-aware and intentional teaching practices.