Teaching the Teacher
Reflections on Student Course Evaluations
Six of my thirteen students did not complete the course evaluation. I don’t know what they thought. I don’t know if the course challenged them, bored them, or fell somewhere in between. I don’t know if they left the term with new frameworks for understanding the organizations where they work, or if they finished the assignments and moved on without looking back. A 54 percent response rate is well above the university average of 20 percent, but that doesn’t make the questions go away. It only makes them easier to avoid.
The course is a graduate seminar in organizational theory. It uses Bolman and Deal’s four-frame model of organizational analysis: structural, human resource, political, and symbolic, combined with adult learning and development theory. Students analyze the organizations at which they work. Every assignment asks them to connect theory to their own institution, to use scholarly frameworks as diagnostic tools for the problems they encounter. The thirteen students enrolled last spring were working professionals: educators, program coordinators, instructional coaches, fitting coursework around full-time jobs, families, and the demands of adult life.
The seven who did respond gave me a lot to work with.
The numbers were strong. Every respondent agreed or strongly agreed that the course made a significant contribution to their learning and professional development. Perfect scores showed up for availability, enthusiasm, timely feedback, clear evaluation criteria, and course organization. But where scores dipped into the “Agree” range rather than “Strongly Agree,” the items pointed toward areas I need to address: whether the teaching methods fully stimulated interest, whether activities facilitated understanding as deeply as I’d like, and whether assignment descriptions were always clear enough. When three out of seven respondents choose “Agree” rather than “Strongly Agree” on whether activities stimulated their interest, I need to look more closely at pacing, variety, and the limitations of asynchronous delivery.
The qualitative comments were more telling. One respondent said the depth of feedback on their assignments stood out, that it was clear the instructor had read their work carefully and engaged with it. Another found the course valuable for understanding how different types of organizations function and what distinguishes educational institutions from nonprofits and for-profit companies. The course gave them a vocabulary for recognizing effective and ineffective leadership in their own workplace.
The comment that stays with me came from a student facing a leadership transition in their department. They wrote that the course gave them a way to assess the organizational culture that outgoing leaders had shaped and to identify what was worth preserving. It also shifted how they saw themselves. They came away believing they had leadership capacity they hadn’t recognized before and feeling prepared to push back when they saw decisions that could harm their colleagues.
The students also pushed back on the course itself, which I welcome. Several wanted synchronous sessions to discuss the material in real time rather than through threaded posts. One wanted a group project to build connections with classmates. Another found the textbook dry, though they valued what they took from it.
These criticisms point to a structural tension. Our students are employed. They commute. They parent. The asynchronous format exists because they cannot be in a classroom at 2 PM on a Tuesday. But the trade-offs are real. The richness of face-to-face conversation, the spontaneity of a classroom exchange, and the simple act of reading another person’s face while they think through a hard question. I’ve tried to compensate by writing detailed weekly summaries of each class discussion, synthesizing every student’s contribution and drawing connections across their responses. One student said the summaries made the online course feel more connected than they expected. But I know it is not the same
Seven students told me the course changed how they think about leadership, organizations, and their own capacity. Six told me nothing. Both responses teach the teacher. I am still learning from each.