Thanks Willie for your comment.

I think I should consider your suggestion and ask my students to bring their own examples into class. Thanks for your idea!

About doing artistic assignment I am not quite sure that what do you mean. my course is microecnomics and it is full of theories related to decision making process of firms and household. There is not a lot of data or something like this and I am not sure what specific artistic assignment I can give to my students.

Thanks Yasaman for your comment and I really appreciate that. Your suggestions are great and applicable in general. My problem is I don’t have enough freedom to make project assignments for students. The other thing is unlike the experiences I had in Iran, here students do not like to participate in class activity too much. For instance, I design a game in class to give some intuition to students to learn better supply and demand and market procedure. I need several volunteers to come ahead and play the game because for a large class it is unfeasible to ask all of people to play game, so I need some volunteers and then most of students are reluctant to come and play the game. It is weird for me because if it were in Iran, I guess there would be lots of volunteers, but here only few people came and I begged other students to come!!!

For me, stimulating students to be active in class and not sitting and listening is very challenging. Although I put some incentives and extra credits for class participation and I always appreciate those who ask question, answer questions and participate in class discussion, but overall I think I am not successful enough and those policies do not work effectively.

Thanks Sheryl. I will start doing that after my second midterm. The course after that is much for abut applied issues in microeconomics and I think in this situation it is easier for student to bring examples from real world. However, my point in this post was about the evaluation in general and that was only an example. As you said, the problem is how we can design an evaluation agenda that evaluate a teacher’s work closer to reality.

Thanks Karen.

At current situation, only student and I can evaluate my job. We have a supervisor in our department who helps us in teaching issues in general but he was never be in my class to see the way I teach and give me the feedback. In fact he came to my class first time I taught in summer 2014 and his feedback was really helpful at that time but this semester he did not come and will not come too. So my point is how in general we can design an evaluation system that gives us comments closer to reality.

Thanks Brittany,

As I said to Karen, during summer when I taught for the first time, the advanced instructor of our department who are the supervisor of Grad students in teaching came to my class and after that we had a meeting and he gave me his feedback but this semester this is not the case since he’s also taught two large classes and I think he does not have enough time to come to other students’ classes. But in general I think having feedback from a supervisor specially for grad students who teach undergrad course is really helpful.

Thanks Carrie

and this is exactly my point that evaluations specially those multiple choice ones could not give us good feedback/information about the reality. As you said sometimes a student may just fill out all questions in good-excellent range to get rid of evaluation asap. sometimes a frustrated student may fill out all in bad-worst choices and as a result maybe it is not close the reality.

Thanks Willie,

and my point is exactly how can I bring those silent students in the middle of the spectrum into leaning community!

I think the era that a person knows everything is passed and now every person need to be specialized in a very very small area. In this approach, having a technology like google can be helpful since you are expert in a tiny area of your field and the google and the internet can help you for other areas that you are interested in but not expert.

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I don’t think that google makes us stupid but I think it makes us dependent. Before the age of google, we depends on our knowledge so people who care about knowledge tried to learn as much as they from the thing they read and study. However, in the age of google that you can get the answer of any questions in a second, maybe you don’t pay that much attention to what you are reading for instance. So I think now we depends more on the internet than ourselves.

Thanks Amy.

I am totally agree with you. I have two short answer questions and the comments of students there were much more helpful compare to those multiple choice questions.

I do your suggestions in pop quizzes I gave them in class. For instance there is a theory that says why some firms in short run shut down their firms to minimize their loss and I gave them a quiz (which counts extra credit so there is not any stress then) that why the cafe in Newman library closed during summer whereas ABP cafe in squires open. So they can apply that theory to this question and I think it helps them to understand better then.