“Don’t Sleep in Class!” and Other Student Advice
Wendi Everton
Eastern Connecticut State University
Do you know how well you teach? Your students have an opinion about your teaching effectiveness, and you most likely receive ratings through your institution’s formal student evaluation system. If you are a brave soul, you might seek additional student feedback by checking out the online professor-rating Web sites. Such feedback can help improve classroom skills, but it may be tough to take because it is so personal.
For the past several years I have used an exercise that yields general behavioral feedback about what works and what doesn’t work in the classroom. This information has helped me sharpen my classroom and presentation skills in my undergraduate and graduate I-O courses. It may be useful to you as well.
In the exercise, students generate “critical incidents” of good and bad professor behavior. These are behaviors that they have actually experienced not just stories that they have “heard.” As a group, the class identifies critical dimensions that unite multiple professor behaviors. This technique can be useful for introducing job analysis, and it helps to connect job analysis information to other topics, such as performance appraisal. As an aside, if you are interested in this exercise, you can find more details about it at the SIOP teaching Wiki, along with other I-O-related teaching materials: http://siopwiki.wetpaint.com/.
So far, I have used the exercise in nine classes: seven undergraduate and two graduate. Some of the example behaviors are absurd, but bear in mind that students have actually seen professors do these things. I don’t think that absurd professor behavior is limited to my university. I recall when one of my own undergraduate professors had gum shoot out of his mouth while lecturing. The gum landed in a classmate’s hair. The detangling took some time.
The behaviors generated here illustrate things that we should and should not do. For the purpose of this article I reviewed all nine sets of dimensions generated and looked for common themes across these sets. The two most frequent dimensions (common to eight of the nine classes) were “interpersonal skills” and “presentation skills.” I want to emphasize that students drove the dimension identification; my main role during this part of the exercise was to record their answers and gently facilitate when they got stuck. Given that almost all of the classes developed these two dimensions, these skill sets are obviously important to students.
Table 1 provides the eight most frequently mentioned dimensions that students identified as critical to professor teaching. Examples illustrative of both good and bad behaviors are provided. There is a bit of overlap in that some behaviors may fit into more than one category. This is something we discuss during the class exercise as important to idea generation and analysis, that rating is subjective judgment after all. There may not be “one best way” to organize the behaviors and dimensions. The dimensions with the highest frequency count appear at the top of Table 1.
Whether you are just beginning your first full-time job or are a more seasoned professional, I hope this list helps you think about your classroom skills. If nothing else this list should serve as a gentle reminder of the behaviors that your students value. Certainly it will be easy to avoid the “Don’t” list. Some more than others as there are some pretty low-bar examples mentioned!
It may be that these dimensions and behaviors are peculiar to my university and student body, but I don’t think so. I see the results as being generally consistent with behavioral findings from the leadership literature. For example, many behaviors would fit into either person orientation (“Do have empathy for students,” and “Don’t ‘hit on’ students”) or task orientation (“Do engage students in discussions,” and “Don’t be absent too much”).
Teaching is not an easy profession, but the good news is that there is a preliminary list of what to do and what not to do in class. Step 1: Don’t sleep in class!
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