Abstract
Student Evaluation of Teachers (SET) is increasingly regarded as an important component of assessing the performance of academic and teaching staff at the university level. On the other hand, academic and teaching staff members are encouraged to engage in self-reflections, reflecting upon the ways they teach. This paper adopts a critical approach in examining the advantages and disadvantages of using SET to assess the performance of academic and teaching staff, and of conducting self-reflections among teachers. It is argued that while SET can be used a reference for academic and teaching staff to improve their teaching skills, pedagogy and course content, self-reflections of academic and teaching staff members can be a useful strategy of perfecting teaching as well.
The advantages of using SET embrace (1) the feedbacks from students to teachers, (2) the need for teachers to respond to those feedbacks, and (3) the closing of the feedback loop if students’ views are taken into account by the teachers to improve not only the content of the courses but also pedagogy and teaching methods. However, the disadvantages of using SET include the following: (1) the tendency of relying SET scores excessively to determine the teaching performance of academic and teaching staff, whose teaching can be evaluated also by other means, including the application and acquisition of teaching development grants; (2) the tendency of a minority of students to retaliate against teachers by using negative comments and scores; and (3) the tendency of a minority of teachers to boost SET scores through a variety of methods prior or during the conduct of SET surveys.
In light of the advantages and disadvantages of SET, teaching self-reflections can be one of the most useful means through which teaching skills, course content and pedagogy can be perfected. Self-reflections of teaching can be conducted by encouraging academic and teaching staff members to write reflectively on each of the courses they teach at the end of the semester, thus constituting a useful individual teaching portfolio. Self-reflections of teaching can also be accompanied by peer observations of classroom teaching so that peer observations with constructive comments and suggestions from other colleagues can stimulate the process of self-reflections on the part of the teachers concerned. Indeed, such self-reflections can also be deposited in a database not for sharing, mainly because of privacy reasons, but for better data management for individual teachers.
Overall, given that SET scores provide one of the instruments of universities to evaluate teaching performance of academic and teaching staff, self-reflections of staff concerned and their combination with constructive peer observations can be considered and conducted so that a supportive environment for the improvement and perfection of teaching can be fostered and sustained.
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