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Category: Director’s Corner

It’s only mid-October, but many of us are already thinking ahead to the end of the semester. Students may be anticipating Final Exams and tickets home, but I’m thinking about something a little different—course evaluations.
Published on Leave a comment on Take Control of Your Course Evaluations

It’s only mid-October, but many of us are already thinking ahead to the end of the semester. Students may be anticipating Final Exams and tickets home, but I’m thinking about something a little different—course evaluations.

You might remember the old days of carbon-copy forms, sealed envelopes, and drop boxes in the Old Convent. Thankfully, we’ve moved to Brightspace for evaluations, saving us from those logistical headaches. No more setting aside class time, reading out scripted instructions, or finding that one student willing to trek across campus with a stack of forms. Now, it’s just a matter of reminding students (again and again) to log into Brightspace and click on the evaluation link.

But why am I thinking about this now, in the middle of October? At Xavier, not every course is evaluated every semester. Only first-year faculty have all of their courses evaluated; non-tenured faculty, after their first year, have two randomly selected courses evaluated each semester; tenured faculty only have one randomly selected class evaluated each year. However, faculty can request evaluations for any or all of their courses.

We recently received a reminder from the Provost that the deadline to request additional evaluations is Monday, October 21. You can submit your request here.

Why You Should Consider Requesting Evaluations

Since earning tenure, I’ve requested evaluations for most of my classes. Why? There are several reasons:

  • Consistency: If one class is being evaluated, why not all? Having evaluations for all my courses provides a clearer, more comprehensive picture of my teaching performance.
  • Certainty: What if my best class of the semester isn’t randomly selected? By requesting evaluations, I ensure I capture the most insightful feedback.
  • Depth: The more evaluations I collect, the more data I have to work with. This richer dataset allows me to identify trends, strengths, and areas for improvement over time.

Course evaluations offer valuable insights into our teaching. The more data we gather, the richer the story we can tell about our teaching journey. While I’m no data expert, even basic visualizations help me make sense of patterns. For instance, this chart compares my positive and negative responses over the years.

A horizontal bar chart displaying various evaluation categories related to a program or service, rated from Poor to Excellent.
Fall 2007 to Spring 2022. This chart offers a comparison between positive (Excellent or Good) responses and negative (Fair or Poor) responses.

In addition to quantitative data, tools like ChatGPT can help summarize qualitative feedback. For example, I recently used it to analyze student comments on my strengths as a teacher. One recurring theme? Supportiveness and understanding. Students often appreciate how I listen to their concerns and adapt based on feedback.

What you do with the data is up to you, but one thing is clear: You can’t benefit from feedback you don’t collect. Whether you’re in your second year or your 18th or your 42nd, consider requesting evaluations for one or more of your classes this semester. The insights you gain might surprise you.

Established in 1994, CAT+FD is one of the older centers for teaching and learning (CTL) in the country. This is perhaps not surprising considering Xavier's commitment to excellence in teaching. Over the coming year, we will be posting a variety of reflections about the evolution of CAT+FD on this blog.
Published on Leave a comment on CAT+FD at 30, Part 1
The 30th anniversary version of the CAT+FD logo
A special logo for our trigintennial!
Original by Jim Rose.
Adapted by Bart Everson.

By now, everyone at Xavier knows that the university will be celebrating its centennial in 2025. Not everyone may realize that CAT+FD is currently celebrating its
30th anniversary. (I think it's a shame we've let a word like trigintennial fall out of common use.) Since this is my first year as director, I thought I'd use this space to reflect on how things have changed over the past 30 years.

Established in 1994, CAT+FD is one of the older centers for teaching and learning (CTL) in the country. This is perhaps not surprising considering Xavier's commitment to excellence in teaching. Over the coming year, we will be posting a variety of reflections about the evolution of CAT+FD on this blog. If you're interested in a deep dive into the history and evolution of CTLs in general, pick up a copy of Mary C. Wright's excellent Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education (2023, Johns Hopkins University Press).

Page one from the CAT News Report, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 1994
The first edition of the CAT News Report. Click the image for a PDF of the newsletter.

CTLs came about, in part, through the recognition that while graduate programs were doing excellent work developing their students into expert scholars in their disciplines, they were not always doing a good job of developing their students into expert teachers. However, because of the timing, the earliest CTLs placed a lot of emphasis on what would eventually become know and educational technology, or EdTech. In the inaugural issue of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching News Report, Dr. Ann Barron, then interim director, explained that the the new Center was committed "to advancing the art of teaching — at ALL levels — in a technological age," an interesting and significant distinction. That issue includes an article about the first Kellogg Mini-grant awards, which supported faculty interested in revising one of their classes, and an article about using Apple's HyperCard to create "multimedia courseware".

The link between CTLs and technology should not be surprising. Consider the year CAT+FD began (for newer readers, CAT+FD was originally just CAT). 1994 was a particularly significant year in terms of publicly available technology. That year, Netscape Communications released Netscape Navigator, which would become the first widely used web browser; Sony released the PlayStation, which, now in its fifth generation, is still one of the most widely used gaming consoles; Sun Microsystems introduced the Java programming language, one of the most influential programming languages; and Kodak released its DC40 camera, one of the first consumer-level digital cameras. The world changed that year, and CTLs like CAT+FD stepped up to help faculty adapt to those changes.

Thirty years later, CAT+FD continues to be true to that original committee, even as the scope of our work has expanded. We are committed to supporting faculty in all aspects of their career in this ever-evolving technological age. Whether faculty want become expert users of our LMS, Brightspace, or improve their student mentoring, whether they want to learn how to incorporate artificial intelligence into their classes or ways to embrace a pedagogy of kindness, CAT+FD continues to provide faculty with the resources they need to shape their professional lives at Xavier.