Blake Wilder

Evidence of Teaching Effectiveness

In addition to the standard Student Evaluation of Instruction (SEI), I collect discursive feedback
from my students at the end of every course. Discursive evaluation forms allow me to ask
targeted questions, prompting my students to provide detailed and specific feedback about my
teaching. With twelve terms of written feedback, I have a wealth of data highlighting my
strengths and documenting the ways in which I have grown as a teacher. In fact, one of my
strengths is the use of feedback to constantly improve my teaching. In addition to end-of-term
feedback, I collect midterm feedback so I can more immediately adjust to the needs of my
current students. Taken together the midterm and end-of-term feedback that I have collected
show that my students recognize my enthusiastic dedication to teaching, that they find my use of
media and current events engaging, and that they appreciate the discussion format of my classes
because it allows them to express their opinions and hear from others. The collected feedback
also shows that I have improved in my ability to scaffold informal writing opportunities and
classroom activities to support the major learning objectives of the courses I teach.
The discursive feedback from my very first semester teaching helped me to see my
personal strengths. One student noted that I was very down to earth and really liked to teach.
Another student provided a concentrated list of adjectives, describing me as friendly - helpful enthusiastic. These sorts of comments span my twelve terms of feedback. They reveal my
commitment to teaching, but they also show how I involve students as equal partners in the
process of learning. Across the data on my SEIs, the responses for instructor interested in
teaching and encouraged in independent thinking are consistently the highest, even when
overall scores dip because Im teaching a course for the first time or experimenting with new
assignment structures. Students in my first course also mentioned that videos helped students
understand what and how [they] should break down [their] sources so [they] could write about
them better and that the use of things going on in pop culture helped a lot. I have continued to
refine the use of media and current events in my class because the feedback tells me that it helps
students understand the process of analysis better. One student that first term found it helpful that
I emphasized class participation to get [students] involved in the learning process, but another
student suggested that I could have encouraged more discussion and more in class writing. I
have indeed refined my use of discussion to build upon that strength, but using in-class writing
more often (and helping students see the connection to their writing assignments) is probably the
biggest area of improvement in my teaching.
Throughout my teaching, I have used blogging as an informal opportunity for students to
practice writing skills, but at the end of my first term teaching, one student said that they really
didnt see how the blog connected to the course. I have worked hard to help students see the
value of blogging to support their learning about writing. In some midterm feedback collected in
the spring of 2011, students said that they thought blogging [was] a helpful component of class
because it helped them feel related to their peers, to see how other people [were] responding,
and provided an opportunity to practice writing more often. By soliciting this feedback at
midterm, I could both acknowledge students enthusiasm for the blog and also re-emphasize how
blogging connected to the learning objective of helping them to think metacognitively about their
writing processes. The three discursive that are attached are from this same course. The answers
to question seven reveal that I have successfully improved my ability to connect of blogging to
course objectives. Those answers also show that I was successful in getting students to think
more deeply about how blogging connected to the goals of the course by responding to the

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midterm feedback that I got from them. Moreover, question seven on the attached discursive
forms is a question that I specifically added to the standard departmental form to collect targeted
feedback on an aspect of my teaching I was trying to improve. The use of midterm feedback and
the customized discursive form highlight my strength of using feedback to improve my teaching.
But more importantly, student feedback reveals that I succeeded in helping students see how
informal writing, like blogging, supported the learning goals of helping students to improve their
writing. As a student points out on one of the attached discursive forms, blogging helped them
learn how writing is a process with several stages so [they] could then apply theses stages to
other papers.
While end-of-term feedback has certainly helped me improve my teaching, the use of
midterm feedback is also invaluable. On six different occasions, I have had consultants from
UCAT come to my class to facilitate a structured feedback session at the midterm of a course.
Midterm feedback often provides more evidence of my strengths, as students note that I [enjoy
my] job and attempts to make it fun and energetic and that I try to get everyone in class
involved (Spring 2010). Sometimes midterm feedback highlights aspects that are going well,
but which could still be improved. In the spring of 2011, students let me know that they liked the
informality of discussion and the opportunity to talk about real issues that are current &
relatable, but they also suggested that I could provide more chances to express opinions on the
topics [they] discuss. I took this feedback to heart and created a lesson where students could
share their feelings about American imperialism, which resulted in the anecdote that begins my
teaching philosophy. At other times midterm feedback can reveal areas of concern that I could
easily fix but which I might not know about. Students expressed that not having grades on
Carmen that makes it hard for [them] to know if [they] are doing things right or not (Spring
2010). This feedback helped me to see the learning process from students point of view. I was
more focused on things like paragraph organization, use of sources, or audience awareness
aspects of writing that arent easily revealed through a Carmen grade book. I also believe I
would not have gotten this feedback from end-of-term assessment tools because students feel the
anxiety of grades more acutely in the beginning parts of the semester. Creating and updating a
Carmen grade book, which is now part of my standard practice, was an easy fix for me to make.
But I couldnt have made it if I hadnt solicited midterm feedback. Moreover, hearing students
express their uncertainty about doing things right or not prompted me to think more about
student metacognition as a crucial part of learning. Consequently, I have tried to include more
free-writing and reflective activities to guide students to think about their learning process in
more complex terms than what they might get from a Carmen grade book.
Even when I dont have UCAT facilitate a structured feedback session, I solicit feedback
from my students informally. The first time I was teaching Introduction to African American
Literature, the midterm feedback revealed that I had overestimated the literary skills that students
were bringing with them. In the second half of the semester, I focused more consciously on the
vocabulary and application of literary analysis. I also rearranged the syllabus schedule to offer a
writing workshop to help students feel more confident about presenting their literary analyses in
the assigned essay. On the end-of-term feedback form, one student wrote that the writing
workshop really helped [them] because teachers seem to expect everyone knows how to write a
perfect paper and [I] didnt, but showed [them] how to make a pretty damn good one. Although
it seemed that the midterm adjustment I made was helpful, the end-of-term feedback revealed
other ways I could improve the opportunities for students to practice literary analysis. Nine of 23
students commented negatively about the required Carmen discussion board posts that I had

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designed to help students practice engaging with literary evidence in an informal setting.
Students felt that they were simply regurgitating fact and quotes or were just going through
the motions. Stating that the discussion board posts didnt seem to be helpful or beneficial,
students were clearly not seeing the connection between these informal writing opportunities and
the course objectives. As with blogging in my First-Year Composition courses, I thought hard
about how to use low-stakes writing more productively to scaffold student development.
When I taught Introduction to African American Literature again the following semester,
I replaced the weekly discussion board posts with four Response Papers. Splitting the difference
between the casual discussion board posts and an organized essay, these papers asked students to
respond to specific literary evidence. I graded the Response Papers on a simple check, checkplus, check-minus scale. I allowed (and encouraged) students to revise these Response Papers at
any point in the semester as long as they came to my office hours to discuss their revision plans
first. At the end of that term, 21 of 38 students offered positive feedback about the Response
Papers, including one student who said that the Response papers [were helpful] b/c they built up
to the bigger papers but left the other six questions on the feedback form entirely blank. One
student noted: the revision process aids in understanding [their] own writing skills and where
they can improve. Another student echoed this metacognitive awareness, saying that even
though it was difficult for [them] to learn to write based on reading, basically explaining
thoroughly how [they] got the ideas. It was mainly a learning experience and it help better [their]
writing. The ability of these students to recognize how the informal writing of the Response
Papers helped them become aware of their thinking and writing process demonstrates that I was
successful in helping students develop metacognition skills in a literature course, just as I had
been in earlier composition courses. The ability of students to think metacognitively about their
work enables student to believe in themselves, as one student pointed out when they noted that
the revision process was when it all clicked for [them] & [they] felt confident in [their] work.
Student comments that the Response Paper further developed [their] thinking skills in
literature or forced [them] to think deeper about the material and truly elaborate [their] points
foreground how this same assignment had also succeeded in helping students develop the
interpretative thinking of literary analysis. Another student, who commented that the
Comparative Paper (the final assigned essay) was a culmination of all the skills [they were]
learning through the response papers and close reading paper, shows that I successfully
scaffolded the course to help students achieve the learning objectives through incremental
successes. And lastly, the student, who appreciated the formal essays because they forced
[them] to use the tools [they] learn in class, affirmed, indirectly, that I successfully compensated
for my original overestimation of students abilities of literary analysis.