Philosophy makes for a good guide, and experience is a useful teacher, yet there is a pragmatic concern. What do the students ultimately experience and report, and how do I adjust based on the integration of all three: philosophy, experience, and student feedback? Despite the known flaws of student course evaluations and, in particular, their misapplication, they can certainly improve future learning experiences when judiciously addressed. By taking these evaluations into account, I essentially found multiple themes over time before coalescing on a core set of themes as time progressed.
Early years
As I began teaching at ACU, I had very little experience. These early years are probably best described as groping in the dark, hoping to find something on which to hold.
Theme 1: Lower your expectations.
My arrival at ACU followed eight years at Research One institutions including Caltech, Trinity College Dublin, and Indiana University. In each of those locations my primary interactions were with people who either had or would soon have a PhD. At ACU I very quickly realized that I had to lower my expectations for interactions with undergraduates, as even the most intelligent ones lacked the training and life experiences that I had come to take for granted. Thus, I spent most of the year adjusting downward my expectations of what students could produce.
Example negative feedback from course evaluations:
Comment 1: “If examples in class were more relevant to practical applications, I think I would remember them… It would would [sic] greatly beneficial if the instructor could help the students retain what they learn.”
Comment 2: “The book, his slides, and his lectures shouldn’t all contradict each other, that is confusing and makes him look like he does not know what he is talking about in most cases. Is not good at directing students in the right direction if they are not understanding the course material. Doesn’t seem ready to me to be teaching a class especially this course.”
Example positive feedback from course evaluations:
“He was definitely enthusiastic about the subject manner. [sic]”
Theme 2: An indicator of a smart person is that they can understand complicated things. An indicator of a truly smart person is that they can explain complicated things to others.
After a little teaching under my belt I began to focus more on improving student comprehension. Occasionally students who were trying to curry favor would say something along the lines of “you’re smart, but this is too hard for me.” Though this is somewhat a compliment, to take it solely as such reflects a bit of willful ignorance. In particular, I feared that the meaning was that although I might understand the topics I was teaching, I could not successfully convey my understanding to them. This fear was supported by the fact that one of my lowest rated evaluation items was statement 7: “The instructor communicates new ideas and concepts in a way that students understand.” Consequently, I focused intently on taking the time to clearly explain even the most complicated things to students in an endeavor to more fully flesh out where the compliment was lacking. My emphasis appeared to work, as not only was item 7 higher in value from year one to year two, by the spring semester it no longer appeared in my list of three lowest items (see Table 2.1).
Example negative feedback from course evaluations:
“Have a variety of things done in the class. Ex: do a few case studies throughout the semester of decisions companies actually faced and see what decision they made and what the outcomes were, having some informative videos…”
Example positive feedback from course evaluations:
Comment 1: “I appreciated his teaching ability and his ability to explain the subject so it made sense.”
Comment 2: “Even though he’s super smart, he still explains things to us very clearly so we can understand.”
Theme 3: I am willing to sacrifice being well-liked if it means that the students are better prepared.
At some point during my early years I observed that my course evaluations had improved substantially, almost too much! I began to suspect that the evaluations were increasing largely because I was focusing too much on entertaining the students and being well-liked and not enough on what actually mattered: preparing students and advancing their learning. I decided to focus on the latter though it meant the former would likely suffer. Part of the issue was that in lowering my terribly high expectations the previous years, I also began helping the students too much. In effect, I was doing their work for them, robbing them of the experience of struggling through challenging problems that is necessary for success outside the classroom. So, I decided that I would leave my expectations largely unchanged for but hold their hands less along the way to let them experience more of the struggle.
Furthermore, the desire to better prepare students at the expense of being liked inspired me to volunteer to resurrect Data Mining, a course that died when Tim Coburn left ACU. Preparing to teach this course took considerable effort as I have not been formally trained in data mining techniques and had to learn on my own during the summer. I was aware that the course was not well-received when previously offered and expected more of the same. However, knowing the ultimate value that students would acquire in taking and learning from the course was a sufficient motivator to teach it. As a result and as predicted, the students did indeed “like me” less (demonstrated by the dip in Fall 2013 evaluations); however, they also appeared to believe that I liked them less and rated item 11 as one of my lowest: “The instructor treats students with dignity and respect.” This was a surprise as it was my highest rated item in each of my first three semesters at ACU. This emphasis did appear to cement items 3 and 17 as my highest rated items: “The instructor demonstrates mastery of the subject matter” and “The instructor challenges students to do their very best”, the latter consistent with my emphasis.
After a year or so of focusing on this theme I received some welcome news (presented in this email) from associate dean Andy Little, among others. Andy informed me that several alumni highlighted the quality and usefulness of my courses in front of the Dean’s Advisory Council, realizing these virtues only after having graduated and joined the workforce. The students to which Andy refers were very recent graduates, suggesting that the long-term perspective expressed in this theme was already beginning to bear fruit.
Example negative feedback from course evaluations:
Comment 1: “Don’t expect more or different things out of different people or groups. Communicate due dates better via reminders in email format. Send or post grades more often and online. ”
Comment 2: “Tests were much harder than expected. They were more in depth than what I felt the class was.”
Example positive feedback from course evaluations:
Comment 1: “Jessup appreciates hardwork and rewards those he sees working hard.”
Comment 2: “The students might have thought this was hard, but it’s because of your courage and eagerness to watch us learn this stuff that this school’s business program is increasing in quality.”
Later years
As time progressed I grew more confident in my teaching ability, particularly the content and the level of expectation. It was during these years that I began to plateau in my teaching evaluations (as one might expect) and concern myself more with the accouterments or melody of my teaching.
Theme 1: Be an encourager who uplifts rather than a holier than thou who browbeats.
A few years back, my local church, Hillcrest Church of Christ, had been searching for a new preacher and during that process the congregation was exposed to a variety of preaching styles. On one hand, some of the preachers had negative attitudes and made assumptions about the listeners that were condescending and often wrong. On the other hand, other preachers were excellent encouragers who had me leaving refreshed with hope and excited about my relationship with Christ. Based on course evaluation data from the previous years, I one day had the disheartening revelation that possibly my students viewed me the same way that I viewed the preachers for whom I experienced distaste: my efforts to hold them to higher standards were perhaps being perceived as a browbeating by an arrogant know-it-all! I could have chosen to simply relent and lower my standards as some of the students appeared to desire. But, I feel that students are not always well-positioned to evaluate how difficult a class should actually be. So, I tried to be more encouraging, even as I retained my high expectations. To inspire me, I even created a screensaver with the above theme (i.e., “be an encourager who uplifts…”) as a continual reminder. The feedback from these efforts appeared to suggest that my efforts paid off, as noted by the comments below.
Example negative feedback from course evaluations:
Comment 1: “Possibly more homework assignments to help students stay up to pace with the semester long group project, to motivate students not to wait till the last minute for everything.”
Example positive feedback from course evaluations:
Comment 1: “Passion for the subject and strong knowledge of the subject matter. Teaching style that respects the students and never belittles them, regardless of their performance in class.”
Comment 2: “I appreciate that he talks to us on our level and tries to make complicated subjects as simple as possible for us to understand.”
Theme 2: Hide it under a bushel – No! I’m gonna let it shine.
Several events combined to inspire me to the above theme. The first event occurred during a college pre-session. There, a colleague recounted some of the difficulties that we had with integrity violations the previous semester and during summer Study Abroad. The second event occurred during Summit. A chance encounter brought me into conversation with my beloved friend and former ACU board member, Joe Ritchie. We were discussing how the university population had changed since I was a student and Joe said “but you care if your students have integrity and are walking rightly, right?” As the words “I do care” fell out of my mouth, my mind wondered “but what am I doing to show it?” Uncertain as to what steps I should take, my first thought was that I could begin my 8am class with a prayer. It is not much, but it does exemplify what I believe to be important behavior. So in the very next 8am class through the end of the year (barring one absentminded exception), I started every remaining 8am class with a prayer. This was the genesis of our little mini-service distributed throughout the day described in my integration of faith and learning. The course evaluations began to show a remarkable increase in students commenting on the positive effects of the opening prayer and scripture readings, suggesting that the efforts were at least somewhat effective.
Example negative feedback from course evaluations:
Comment 1: “Maybe have something that explains better of what information is in what document on course sites.”
Comment 2: “I have never left a comment like this before for a teacher. This class was a graduate level statistics class that should have been used for those who are interested in business statistics. This class was not for students like myself and everyone else that took one basic level stats class before enrolling in Dr. Jessup’s ‘Marketing research’ class.”
Example positive feedback from course evaluations:
Comment 1: “We love Dr. Jessup! The subject is not my favorite, but the class has really shown me how beneficial and crucial research is for each business student. I appreciate how Dr. Jessup really cares about his students and is making it a point to keep Christ in the classroom… He is super smart and passionate about his work. Thankful for COBA professors who push us to be better and love us through it! Thank you for pouring into us this semester Dr. Jessup, keep up the prayers at the beginning of class, it makes a difference :)”
Comment 2: “He often related how integrity is vital to Christians in business. He even related course concepts (overfitting) to Jesus.”
Theme 3: Multidimensional balance OR Coalescence of philosophies
Around this time I won the ACU Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award. Though I am still humbled to receive this award given the incredible number of fantastic professors on campus, it helped solidify the idea that my efforts were paying dividends – dividends that better teachers have not received due to a variety of factors beyond their control. Thus, while extremely proud of it, I recognized that I should not mistake the award for a signal that I have achieved anything near to perfection.
Consequently, my recent focus has been on balancing the various foundations of my teaching philosophy (“do not succumb to the desire to be well-liked by lowering teaching standards” vs. “be an encourager who uplifts rather than a holier than thou who browbeats”). Furthermore, I began to emphasize unstructured learning elements, as described in my teaching philosophy. Nonetheless, the desire to provide students with unstructured problems naturally conflicts with maintaining the clarity of presentation that I still value.
One of the ways I have attempted to balance these conflicting goals is by attempting to appropriately set students’ expectations. I now take care to explain to students the value that both I and their future employers place on their being able to solve unstructured problems. Likewise, I now take more time to clarify the intentionality of how I teach and grade so that students better understand that there is a method to my madness. Similarly, at the end of class I now take time to review the entire semester so that they can see the progressive path upon which they have trod.
Example negative feedback from course evaluations:
Comment 1: “Be more timely with grades.”
Comment 2: “Use canvas!”
Comment 3: “Offer the class at a different time besides MWF at 8:00″
Example positive feedback from course evaluations:
Comment 1: “He was intentional on making sure he taught the course material well and brought a great amount of enthusiasm to the course.”
Comment 2: “We actually put the tools that we are learning about to use. He makes us think about why we are doing things and to critically evaluate course material.”
Comment 3: “Dr. Jessup is really good at keeping his students engaged. He comes up with real–life examples that help us really connect to the content of the class. The research project is really effective to understand consumer behavior and data analysis. It is hard but it provides a lot of value to our education. He is very smart and passionate about what he teaches.”
Comment 4: “Jessup should be commended on his teaching style for any of his classes, and other professors should take a page out of his book. As much as I hated marketing research and consumer behavior at times, I would much rather struggle to actually learn something then get an easy A from a professor who wants to be “cool” or “my friend”. In fact, I think of Jessup as more “cool” or “my friend” than any of the professors who try to be. What’s “cool” is having passion for a subject and truly challenging us to learn. This is college, and if ACU wants to be perceived as prestigious or academically challenging they would hire or implement a style like Jessup’s for all courses.”
Future years
I intend to continue tweaking based on student feedback, seeking balance between what I believe students need and employers desire vs. what students request after experience with my teaching. To remain constant would not even be possible (e.g., with my hand forced by the pandemic, I will now be using Canvas for all of my classes, to the delight of many students) yet continual, dramatic changes would amount to a regular throwing of the dice, casting out any progress achieved.