Sample Self-Evaluation Essay

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.