Are You at the OK Plateau?!

Since I have been teaching for 20 years, I do not hold much stock in standardized course evaluations.  Indeed I have been reading the littany of research that has to do with student evaluations of teaching (SET) and convinced now more than ever that they are but one limited method by which to assess the quality of one's teaching from the students perspective.  I will be sharing this research in future posts.
As a result, I piloted an in depth SET with help from the students who took my spring human resource management course under the auspices of employee performance evaluation. The purpose of the activity was to allow students to apply what they were learning about employee performance evaluation to the context of teaching and get a richer more meaningful understanding of what it is like to be a student at Purdue.

The students answered five essay questions which essentially asked them to describe their dream teacher, describe the typical professor they have had at Purdue across all classes, the one course evaluation item they would pick to assess the quality of a professor’s teaching, how they would evaluate teaching if President of Purdue, and how I compared to their dream teacher and what could be done to do a better job.

The studentst took to this essay assignment like never before on written assignments.  There were no questions on "how many words" or "how many pages?"  They poured their hearts into the assignment because they need to be heard and they knew I would listen because I give a damn. 

I will tell you that I learned a great deal about what students want from teachers and it is pretty simple; someone who likes what they do, engages students in the learning, dresses professionally, enthusiastic, prepares them for the career that awaits them upon graduation, and can speak English. I sadly learned that students do not experience their dream teacher very often at Purdue.   What about your school, college or university?

The response to the last question pertaining to my teaching made my heart sink.  The students basically told me that I have reached the “OK Plateau” in teaching the human resource management class, which was described in Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein with respect to learning a new skill (a book I constantly recommended during all the ACF regional workshops I did this past spring). To get to the OK Plateau people go through three stages:

o Cognitive stage – intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently.

o Associative stage – concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient.

o Autonomous stage – when you figure that you’ve gotten as good as you need to get at the task you’re running on autopilot.

Based on the feedback from students they told me I appeared to be on autopilot (Ok Plateau). Yes, I was dressing professional and enthusiastic as always but I was not digging down deep and giving student’s current information on HR in the hospitality industry and I was teaching them in an old and tired manner. I took each and every comment to heart because teaching defines me like nothing else in my life so I pledged to those students that I would reinvent myself and the class to be more current and engaging when I teach it in spring 2012. In fact, I am going to do more cooperative learning as I had used successfully early in my career at Purdue. I will also look at ways to improve the HTM 331 class for fall 2011 and the HTM class for HTM 100. I got low scores on the exam course evaluation items for HTM 100 so will look for ways to make that more fair when teaching it in 2012.

So I am putting the question to those who follow the blog.  Are you at the OK Plateau?  Are you showing up for class, going through the motions, putting in your time, and moving mindlessly through your day?  If you are, guess what, the students know it!  You are not fooling them one bit and they are paying you for your services.  That was how they were feeling about my teaching this past spring and had I not taken the time to ask them for deep meaningful feedback I would still be under the illusion that I was doing quality instruction -- when indeed I was not!  Perhaps you might conduct a similar feedback session with your students, which I highly recommend because the results can be sobering.  Of course, that depends on whether you can handle the truth!