The Adjunct Track

Getting Good Teaching Evaluations Without Stand-Up Comedy

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By Jill Carroll

Adjuncts live or die by our teaching evaluations. Some of us get let go, despite good evaluations, but that's another story. Generally speaking, we are hired to teach -- period. And if we don't teach well, we get the ax.

Many commentators in academe say this reality pushes adjuncts to design the content of our courses to please the students. You must give the students what they want or they'll give you bad evaluations and you'll lose your job. You can't grade too hard, or make them read texts that are too difficult, or push them in any way. Make it fun and easy and you'll be fine. After all, the students are "consumers" of the "education product," and we have to make the customers happy.

Most of us in academe have a hard time with the idea of compromising our content to please the "customers" -- at least I hope we have a hard time with it. Our job is to educate, not merely entertain. And often, the material we must teach is dense, hard, dry and not "fun." But conventional wisdom suggests we can either choose to keep our content challenging and risk being fired, or compromise our content (and our scholarly integrity) and keep our jobs.

I don't think it has to be so "either/or." It's possible to maintain rigor in course content in such a way that the students are educated as well as engaged. With proper attention to what I call your "teaching persona" you can maintain quality content and garner good evaluations at the same time.

What is a teaching persona? It is the professional "self" you put forth when you deal with students. It is your in-class presence. This persona is different from the one you use with colleagues or friends. You must construct your teaching persona to the best advantage of yourself and your students.

"But that sounds like acting or performance," you might say. "I'm an instructor, not a performer."

Wrong. As an adjunct, you are a professional speaker. That is, you speak for a living. And anyone who succeeds as a professional speaker will tell you straight up that you are a performer, whether you know it or like it. Successful speakers do not merely disseminate information. They present the material in a way that is engaging to the audience. Successful teaching is a performance, and the sooner we make peace with that, the better.

Cultivating your teaching persona means paying attention to the performance nature of your teaching so you can work it to your advantage. Remember, you are playing a role the minute you walk through the door, and that role is yours to define. Given this reality, what traits should your teaching persona exhibit when you walk into the classroom?

Commitment -- to the students and to the material -- is one of the most basic traits. Students respond well to instructors who demonstrate a commitment to them by caring about their progress and by being fair all around. Students will turn off like a light switch if they detect that you don't care if they do well, learn the material, or understand it. I've seen some of my colleagues (not adjuncts, by the way) cop an attitude with the students that suggested, "I'm just here to give you the information. Whether you understand it or not is up to you. It's not my problem." Someone with that attitude doesn't deserve good teaching evaluations, shouldn't expect to get them, and really ought to be run out on a rail. We must care that the students learn the material, or at least pretend to if we don't. Remember? This is a role we are playing -- it's acting! Act like you care even if you don't. Ideally, though, demonstrate your genuine care for the students, and they'll respond to you.

Basic fairness also shows your commitment to the students. Fairness takes various forms -- writing tests that don't privilege a particular learning style; being clear in your assignments; grading with consistency, clarity, and equanimity; being available to students when you say you'll be available; and many other things. Students know a fair instructor when they see one. Just one classroom episode that violates fairness will eat you up like a cancer. Cultivate and protect this trait of your teaching persona, because as an adjunct you won't survive without it. And it's just the right thing to do.

When you show a commitment to your students, you can more easily maintain your commitment to your material in the classroom. As scholars, we have acquired a body of knowledge, and we must teach that material as it is; otherwise we compromise our own scholarly integrity. But, if we've convinced the students that we care about them and will be fair with them, we can say something like this to them: "Look, I know this material is hard and dense. I can't change that fact. And I'm committed to teach it because I'm paid to do so. But, I'm also committed to you -- your tuition dollars pay my salary. So, I want you to understand this hard material. I want to you see how important it is. It is hard, you'll be lost a lot of the time, you'll be frustrated. But I'll give it my best shot to help you understand this stuff. Truth is, it's some of the most exciting and important material on the planet if you'll just stick with me and wade through it."

Now what have you done in saying something like this? You've created a teaching persona that is both compassionate and challenging, caring and demanding. So, now you can go about your work, honoring your material and your students at the same time. Just maintain that posture consistently throughout the term -- don't let it flag or falter -- and you'll most likely get good evaluations. Students will write, "It was really hard, but she made us learn it and it was good." Or, "I was lost a lot of the time, but I always felt better about it when I left the classroom -- his lectures always cleared it up." Or, "I had to study a lot for this -- the tests were really hard -- but I learned more than I have in other classes because she pushed us." Or, finally, "I still hate this topic, but I'm glad I had it from this instructor -- he made it as good as it could be."

Commitment to the students combined with scholarly integrity give you evaluations like this. But, there is one more trait of the successful teaching persona that cannot be overlooked: passion for your material. You must lure your students into dense, difficult material by catching them up in your own passion for the subject. They will get engaged in it only when you are engaged in it.

Now, each of us has our own style of being passionate about things. Some of us are loud and boisterous, while others have a quiet intensity. You must raise your awareness of your own way of being passionate about your material, and graft that into your teaching persona. Generally, you can't just stand passively behind a lectern, never looking up from your notes, droning on in a monotone voice and expect your students to get caught up in your energy field. You don't, however, have to come in with all kinds of visual aids, props, toys, and other stuff just to keep their attention. You simply have to show your own engagement in the material in some way that is consistent with your personality, and incorporate a few basic teaching techniques to get you out from behind that lectern.

Like what? Well, look at the students. Make eye contact. Vary the tone of your voice. Speak loudly and directly to the students, looking them in the eyes. Walk around a bit, even walk up and down the aisles. Break away from your notes or outline from time to time and talk extemporaneously -- this gives the students something "unplanned" and "fresh" -- at least, it seems so to them, even if you've planned to do this very thing. Think about how the material matters in the world or in your particular field, and don't forget to share this with the students. Make sure you don't just speak -- write on the board, or on an overhead.

These are just basic teaching tips that, presumably, we all know. But every week I walk past classrooms in my institutions and see veteran instructors standing like columns behind a podium or sitting like lumps at a conference table. And their voices sound like that teacher out of the Charlie Brown cartoons -- "wa wa wonk wa wonk, wa wa" -- on and on. And the students are slumped, glazed, and dazed.

You have to figure out a way to show excitement for your material. "Well, I'm not excited about it," you say. "I'm bored, too." Well, act like you're excited. This is performance, remember? Also, if there is a body of knowledge big enough to have a course devoted to it, then numbers of other people have found this material exciting. Avail yourself of their wisdom and find out what's so exciting about it so that you, too, can get pumped up. This is your job. Otherwise, don't sign the contract, and go do something else.

You can consistently be a tough instructor who gets good evaluations if you place your demands within the context of genuine commitment to the students and passion for your material. This, in turn, is a win-win-win situation for everyone involved: for your institution, because they get a good instructor who serves their "customers" well; for the students, because they get a lot of bang for their buck even though, initially, they wanted an easy class; and for you, because you get good evaluations and get hired again and again. With the right mix of commitment and passion, you'll not only not get fired up, you'll have more teaching opportunity than you can handle.