Once you get a reputation as a bad teacher, is there any way to change it? Or are students always going to write you off from the beginning?
I have a colleague who has quite the reputation for being rude to students, unapproachable during office hours, and disorganized in the classroom. Students complain to me about him all the time (I just put on my I-support-my-colleagues face). His ratemyprofessor is full of student rants and, truth be told, some fairly logical, well-supported complaints. Students start the semester knowing his reputation, and I wonder if that fact alone is the biggest contributor to their low opinion of him-- not his actual actions in the classroom.
So is a frowny face on ratemyprofessor too much to overcome? Are there any strategies that professors can employ to turn around a reputation?
2 comments:
It's actually very easy to overcome this kind of bad reputation: teach a freshman course. These students who know nothing about college life will get their first impression of your college from you. Then, they will spread accounts about you for the rest of their career as students.
More like they keep getting these guys to teach what tend to be very difficult courses to begin with. So rather than having someone who's putting forth the extra effort into teaching for what's a critical course, you get these dinosaurs who don't care about students. Combine bad teaching with a difficult course is recipe for disaster. If your colleague cared (at all) they could probably start to balance out the negatives. Teaching seminars and not so critical courses might help too.
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