Evaluations

A natural teacher!

Reflecting on Evaluations
Student evaluations continue to shape my teaching style and the design of my courses. Through these responses, I’ve learned that students value, above all, 1:1 interaction with their teachers, including extended office hours and detailed paper comments. I like to pay close attention to my students’ writing processes, and my willingness to look at multiple drafts and provide thoughtful responses on papers is something that my students continue to note in their positive evaluations. I also have found that students desire multi-media classroom experiences that include lots of close reading instruction. Some responses reveal surprising apprehension around close reading skills, an apprehension that was alleviated when we practiced as a class. I continue to make an effort to include more class readings and small groups activities that involve working through textual passages together.

Students have also provided invaluable insight into what teaching strategies “hit or miss.” For example, students with whom I initially assigned a class blog did not find the activity very helpful. They weren’t seeing the type of class interaction I had anticipated, and many thought it was more “busy work” than meaningful preparation. From these responses, I began to consider how I might restructure the assignment to encourage more student engagement. For the next course, I switched from the university platform to Tumblr, a social media site that allows for more diverse types of posts and interactions among students. The Tumblr was much more successful than the first blog. Students could access the site easily on their mobile devices and could post memes, links, videos, and comments with greater ease. The Tumblr remains one of my favorite class projects, and I’ve included a link for it here!

Official Student Evaluation: Course Evaluations, Summer 2017

Unofficial Written Student Evaluations: Student Recitation Evaluations, Fall 2014

 

See my former student’s article, “The Mysterious Art of the TA” (page 12)  in an issue of The Blotter, the NYU English department newsletter. Bonus: Check out pages 4 and 5 for a recap of a graduate student conference I co-organized with my colleague Ruby Lowe!