This week I received my first set of teaching evaluations… Let’s just say they weren’t pretty at all. I knew they were going to be bad, but they were catastrophic. Among several concerns my students had, one was a previous blog post I had written where I was wrestling with the disconnect between student motivation, evaluation, and course objectives. In that post, I was reflecting on a Faculty Learning Collective distributed video describing the observation that most students will not seek deep understanding as a matter of course, and that teachers have traditionally blamed this on the students rather than understanding the thinking and learning processes that lead to this behavior. In my blog, I unfortunately wrote that my students “don’t care” as much as I do. This reflected negatively on them, and distracted from the goal of the blog post: to describe my difficulties in teaching them and to solicit referrals to additional resources or techniques.
As I said, my teaching evaluations were quite poor and so I have many other teaching challenges ahead of me, but one principal concern I have been thinking about is how to manage my public presence in social media. My twitter account is linked directly to my George Washington University research website, and I have made it one of my means objectives not to remain anonymous in social media. This means objective is intended to help me achieve my strategic objective of being available as a mentor to others interested in engineering education and research, and to use my identity to promote transparency and professionalism in my online conduct.
So, I learned many hard lessons about transparency, social media, and classroom etiquette this semester. While using social media can be a remarkable opportunity for the enhancement of the university’s learning community, professors using social media and open identification risk snowballing missteps. For me, I had broken my students’ trust during class, and that broken trust was exacerbated by public writing that maligned their motivations. Because this trust was broken, every violation of their other expectations of me was only magnified and I never regained a productive rapport with my students.
What does this all have to do with social media? Well, I like to write about what I’m thinking about, and during the academic year most of what I’m thinking about is teaching [whether teaching new graduate students methods for productivity in my research area, or basic instructional methods for my classes]. Although this is not reflected in the distribution of my recent blog posts, I will continue to actively learn about teaching and learning, and continue to write about my struggles and concerns. The problem is that teaching and learning are two-sided: teacher-student. Because it is two-sided, I cannot control the reactions and opinions of my students, especially since the written word stands apart from it’s author at the time it is received. The question I am now struggling with is: “Are the professional costs of writing about my teaching experiences so great that I should forego the benefits of sharing them through public blogging?” Perhaps more importantly, the question should be: “Are the personal and professional costs to students of my writing about my teaching experiences so great that I should forego the benefits of sharing them through public blogging?”
Admittedly, I am not prepared to resolve this question just yet, but I must resolve it before August 29th…