I want to provide students with a sample of an evaluation essay. Therefore, I have written an essay in which I evaluate my teaching. I hope this serves as a useful model for your own work.
In the
fall and spring semesters of the 2016-2017 academic year, I taught English
101E, a class that covers the regular curriculum of Eng 101 but does so in two
semesters instead of one. For me, the best part of teaching this class was the
daily interaction with the students. I love teaching and many of my students
were so thoughtful and diligent that it was a joy to teach them. However, this semester
also presented many difficulties for me. Grading student papers taught me much
about how effective or ineffective my teaching strategies were and I plan to
learn from my mistakes and become a better teacher in the future.
My first
difficulty this term was a technical one. I just could not get Blackboard to
work for me. While I was able to post grades for students, other files
disappeared after I posted them and I was unable to post new files. I solved
this problem by writing a teaching blog. This strategy had several advantages:
it provided a record of the day’s activities that students could review, it
benefitted students who have learning disabilities that make it hard for them
to take notes rapidly, and it helped students who were absent keep up with the
course. The major disadvantage of the
blog was that I believe it may have indirectly promoted student absenteeism
because students could get the material from the blog without coming to class.
Another
problem I had as a teacher was finding just the right balance between lecturing
and letting students write—and this is a writing course after all. Sometimes, I
would arrive with fifty minutes of prepared material only to have a roomful of
students look thoroughly miserable with having so much information crammed down
their throats. In response, I leaned too far the other way and gave too many writing
workshop days. Often, the result was that students surfed the net on the cell
phones instead of doing work. Toward the end of the term, I finally hit in a
balance of thirty minutes of teaching and twenty minutes of writing. This plan
seemed to work most of the time.
I was
not always consistent with the word of the day and grammar points and believe I
should have offered these brief lessons during every class. I also wish I had
had regular quizzes on Fridays as a way of encouraging regular attendance.
In
addition to adjusting classroom procedures, I found I needed to adjust the
balance of material taught. My biggest mistake was my failure to teach proper
academic citation as thoroughly as I should have. I realized this failure when
I graded papers and found so many students not citing their sources as at all.
I had showed students how to use Purdue Owl for citations and thought I had
done enough. I clearly had not. When I teach this class again, I will be sure
to devote more time to this subject.
Another
area that could be improved was classroom discussion. I found that, too often,
a few students carried the discussion while others sat in silence. The reason
for their silence was that I was asking about grammar points and vocabulary,
and students were afraid to be wrong in front of the whole class. I need to
devote more time to thinking about how to conduct class discussions in a way
that engages all of the students.
One of
my teaching strengths, I thought, was in trying to explain the difference
between summary and analysis. I gave many demonstrations in class and put
several examples on my teaching blog. Learning to analyze a text is difficult
because it is not something students are asked to do very often. However,
analysis is a requirement in college and no one can get through four years at a
university without mastering this skill. The next time I teach this class, I
will devote even more attention to this vital topic.
Another
strength of my teaching was my emphasis on paragraph development. An online
source provided valuable practice in developing topic sentences and writing
paragraphs that were both unified and coherent. In the future, I will begin
teaching this subject even earlier in the semester than I had before.I will also provide more in-class practice that involves either individual or group work to cement these lessons.
Next
fall, I will continue the blog. I will also devote more time to developing
lecture questions that make everyone feel comfortable participating. In
addition, it would be a good idea to devote more time to sentence structure and
to give regular quizzes to encourage attendance.
Teachers
not only teach their students, they learn from them. I have learned so much
about which teaching techniques work and which do not work at all. The most
important lessons for me this term involved balance and overcoming my tendency
to either do too much or too little. If I apply this lesson to my future classes,
my teaching will indeed become much better.
