Teaching: Planning, Teaching, Evaluating, Advising
Teaching at Evergreen involves planning your course or program, teaching it, evaluating students, submitting credit reports and advising students. Evening and Weekend faculty are also involved in college governance assignments, often serving on policy committees known as Disappearing Task Forces (DTFs).
Planning your course or program
When you teach in Evening and Weekend Studies, we expect you to write catalog copy for the published class listing in a timely and complete manner, order books and materials, and attend the appropriate Academic Fair(s) with your syllabus. Students in Evening and Weekend Studies appreciate a syllabus that details the entire quarter’s work, including final projects, exams, assignments, field trips and holidays.
Teaching your class
At Evergreen we use a student-centered learning-community approach to teaching. This means that seminars, workshop, labs and other collaborative activities are central rather than merely supplemental to lectures. If you haven’t yet, please read the Pedagogical Principles section in this guidebook to help you think about how your teaching can reflect Evergreen’s ideals. Generally, in traditional institutions, faculty operate on the assumption (explicit or implicit) that you can transmit knowledge through lectures and individual work on the part of students. At Evergreen, we believe that interaction with others and experiential learning help students make connections among ideas and between concepts and applications. Classroom arrangements can encourage collaboration. Arranging tables in a circle enables everyone to contribute to a collaborative discussion and discourages (though certainly doesn’t eliminate) one-direction discourse.
Because students look to faculty as mentors for learning, you are encouraged to establish an identity as facilitator as well as expert. Evergreen students tend to respond to a teacher who admits to not knowing everything and acts as a facilitator for discovering knowledge. Finally, we encourage you to take risks and try teaching styles, assignments and content that challenges you as well as the students. As a member of Evergreen’s faculty, you will also be invited to participate in faculty development opportunities so you can learn and practice new teaching strategies. Each year in your own self-evaluation, you will write about your teaching experience—your goals, strategies, innovations and personal reflections on your teaching that year.
Evaluating students
This part of your teaching is crucial both in terms of your methods for evaluating students and your timeliness in doing so. Throughout the quarter you should provide opportunities for students to understand how well they are doing in your class. We are concerned not with comparing students on a curve, but observing their individual development. That is why we write narrative evaluations rather than simply assigning grades. You might chat informally with students, give pop quizzes, a midterm, or a major assignment. You may, as a result of your assessment, have a student who averages 95% on all assignments. Rather than only stating that fact, however, the narrative evaluation gives you an opportunity to identify new learning, particular skills, strengths or abilities, and challenges the student should work on to do even better.
By Evergreen policy, you must inform students in writing if, in the fifth week of class, you believe they may lose credit because they are not doing adequate work. Clearly, some students will do fine until week nine or ten, and then fail to complete crucial assignments, and in that case you will give no credit (equivalent to failing) or partial credit (you may reduce the number of credits a student receives). Please realize that when you give partial credit because a student has not completed some requirements, you may not address what the student did not do in the evaluation. The Student Evaluation form is a record of student achievement, so only discuss what the student learned.
It is important to keep good records of attendance, seminar participation, papers and other assignments completed. Some faculty use a grid of some sort or create electronic files on each student. Once you have all the data you need, you should reflect on the learning objectives you had for your course or program. Ideally these will be listed in the syllabus or covenant so they are not a surprise to students at evaluation time. All students are required to write a self-evaluation, according to our Faculty Handbook. Your covenant should be clear about this point.
Faculty teaching in full-time or half-time programs are expected to have individual, face-to-face evaluation conferences with each of their students at the end of each quarter during evaluation week. You should require that each student submit his or her self-evaluation either before or during the conference. Please note that you cannot require a student to submit his or her faculty evaluation prior to submission of your evaluation of the student.
Please keep your narrative evaluations of students very brief. Full-time faculty are expected to write less than one page per quarter for full-time work (16 credits). Therefore, 2- 4-, or 6-credit course or 8-credit program evaluations should not be too lengthy. The best approach is to identify and address learning objectives rather than all the activities and aspects of your course or program. What, for example, are the three most important concepts students should have learned? How can you tell that this student reached a clear understanding of them? Usually a project, paper, or presentation illustrates that learning.
Submitting Evaluations
At the end of each quarter you can see a list of your students on your “my.evergreen.edu” page. You need to submit one of three reports for each enrolled student: a Faculty Evaluation of Student Achievement, a No Credit Report or an Explanation of Incomplete Status.
The deadline for submitting your evaluations using the online system is two weeks after the end of evaluation week.
Faculty Evaluation of Student Achievement
There are three types of information about the student’s work included on this form:
Description: Write a short (usually one or two paragraphs) description mentioning primary learning objectives (concepts, principles, skills, etc.).
Evaluation: As briefly as possible, describe the student’s progress in meeting the learning objectives you mentioned above. You will not have space to address all of the work the student accomplished. Consider referring to some of the work as exemplifying the student’s learning. When you write student evaluations, a good rule of thumb is to begin with a general descriptive statement of the student. For example, Gail exceeded all requirements of this course and showed particular strength in facilitating collaborative working groups. Or, Holly met sufficient requirements for credit in this course, and showed, by her seminar participation and writing, that she is grappling with fundamentals of critical thinking. Next, address the learning objectives in your course or program, using seminar, or project work, or an essay only as an example. Ivan demonstrated a very solid understanding of the ways in which historians approach their work in his well developed oral history project. Finally, consider indicating where you would place the student in terms of academic levels: Jerry is well prepared for advanced work in linguistics. Or, Kerry needs more work in fundamental cellular principles before doing intermediate work in biology.
Suggested Course Equivalencies: List equivalencies normally used in traditional colleges and universities. College catalogues can be found online of the library if you need inspiration. Please do not use general categories such as social science or psychology. Instead, try to be specific, and break the credit down if necessary. Because credit equivalencies are a primary tool for discerning what subjects we teach, consider giving credit for writing, quantitative reasoning or art if these were significant components of the students’ work in this area.
No Credit Report: This form is used for students who were registered but did not appear in your class, or for students who disappeared during the course of your class. Your program secretary has the form. If a student has done sufficient work to receive partial credit, do not use this form—instead, file an evaluation for the credit earned.
Explanation of Incomplete Status: An incomplete means a student has not finished the work of the class. Generally, it is best to give no credit or reduced credit to students who do not complete their work. Most students’ lives continue to be just as full and busy after your class as during it, and incompletes seldom resolve successfully. Faculty members may revise their evaluations of students to give additional credit should the student produce credit-worthy additional work. You may revise an evaluation clear up until an official transcript is issued. Adjunct faculty must have permission from their dean to grant an incomplete because of the duration of their contracts. If your dean approves of you granting an incomplete, fill out the online form, and set an early deadline.
Advising Students
You may be the only faculty member a student knows well in a given quarter, so you will find students seeking your advice. In addition, new students do not always get a sufficient orientation, so you may have students who do not understand the Evergreen system. Learning about the college and the curricular offerings we have will make you a better advisor to students who consult you. If you cannot help a student, please send them to Academic Advising, which has extended hours in the evenings specifically to address the needs of students in Evening and Weekend Studies.