Faculty, Students Prepare for PIE

Last winter, faculty members voted on Student Council’s proposal for the Post Instructional Evaluations (PIE), students’ end-of-the-term assessments of their instructors. This school year, faculty members and the administration finalized the implementation of PIE, and the forms will be distributed via email this winter.PIE is a survey that will allow students to anonymously review teachers at the end of the term and rate and comment on them. Questions covered include: “Did your teacher abide by the homework guidelines?” and “Did your teacher give you one week notices for your papers and tests?” Each of these questions will be answered with a rating of one to five, based on whether the student strongly disagrees or agrees, and the results obtained through the surveys will then be averaged and given to department heads, who will examine the results and look for abnormalities.

Lundy Smith, English department chair, explained the basis behind PIE.“It’s not asking people to rate teachers; it’s really talking nuts and bolts about what’s going on in the classroom. As an instructor, if you’re getting responses that say that ‘there’s too much homework,’ sometimes we don’t realize how our lesson plans are coming across to the kids,” he said.Smith continued, describing how PIE will allow department heads to initiate communication with teachers that might need improvement. “I think it will open up a dialogue between teachers and maybe department heads—so if one teacher says, ‘No, I’m giving the [correct] amount of homework,’ but their PIE is saying ‘No, their homework is taking me two hours a night,’it’ll be a way for us to say to the teacher, ‘Well, you may think you’re only giving 45 minutes of homework, but specific kids are saying it’s taking 2 hours,’” he said. “So I’m hoping it will create openness, and kids and faculty alike will have the chance to get a sense of what’s really going on in the classroom.”

PIE is currently being developed through a vendor. IT searched for, and is now working with, the vendor to make PIE as convenient and accessible as possible. Laura Marshall, one of the heads of the committee working on PIE, explained what IT is currently working on. “We’re working with IT this fall and looking for an easy way to administer it, so it’s easy for students to take it and easy for faculty to interpret the results, so we’re not in inundated with a massive amount of data that’s just unmanageable and uninformative,” she said. “So, we’re going to hire the vendor to set up the structure, and we hope that [it] will up and running by the end of March.”

Marshall said that when PIE is completed, it will be available on multiple platforms, such as phones, computers and iPads. PIE will also be easy to access and complete. “An email will be sent to you, and these are the PIEs you have to fill out, and you can tap on the link and it will take you to the survey, like Survey Monkey. It will also give you reminder emails,” she said.While some faculty are welcoming PIE as a positive addition, others are more apprehensive.Some instructors worry that PIE will become a way for students to anonymously criticize their teachers without necessarily having the goal of teacher improvement.Modern languages instructor Inna Sysevich worried that students will use their anonymity in the wrong way.“I think as everything else, there are positive sides and negative sides just like everything in life has a little bit of both. I think it's good that students have voice and can be heard. Being given that voice is a good thing. My concern is how you’re going to use that voice, because when you speak openly, you’re going to weigh your arguments, you’re going to be responsible about what you say,” she said. “My hope is that when kids can go to their computer and give feedback, you guys are going to be just as responsible and honest with yourselves.”

"My hope is that when kids can go to their computer and give feedback, you guys are going to be just as responsible and honest with yourselves."

Sysevich continued, “I hope everyone realizes that even though you’re not putting your signature on [PIE], you should be approaching it like you are.” Modern languages instructorAhmed Jabari agreed, describing an example from a similar situation at the university he used to work at. Jebari worried that students would evaluate teachers based on their personal biases rather than facts. “In my experience in the past at the university level, there is something like PIE where students evaluate the teachers, and most of the time, it comes out negatively,” Jabari said. “Students who don’t like the teacher will cause the evaluation to come out negatively just because they got a low grade or they didn’t like the teacher’s perspective, or whatever the issue may be.” However, former StuCo Vice-President and senior Emily Lemmerman addressed these concerns of students criticizing teachers without the aim of improvement. “I know that initially there was this concern that [PIE] would lead to students going on witch hunts on teachers who they disliked or on rants on teachers they didn’t like,” she said. “But I think in fact when a teacher repeatedly gets the box ticked about ‘never assigns homework until 6 p.m. and expects you to do it,’ that’s something that is seriously a problem, but it’s also pretty easily resolvable.”Lemmerman continued, adding why PIEs will prove to be beneficial in these cases. “Often the teachers who do this aren’t necessarily bad teachers, they just continually do that. If the department heads are aware of it and checks in with them about it, it’s not something that needs to be a big deal; it can be a simple fix. I think there are a lot of things like that that just happen that are super important, and I’m glad that it is being addressed,” she said.Faculty have also wondered how PIE and the previous implemented Mid-Term Effort To Improve Classes (METIC) will work together. While PIE will be used at the end of the term, METICs are used in the middle of the term.Sysevich believed there is a difference between the two evaluations, mainly because one is given in the middle of the term, and the other, at the end of the term. “I think there is a difference. A lot of classes you’re going to take this one term, [since] a lot of classes aren’t sequences. So METIC is important in telling a teacher what you learn best from, what activities are most helpful or least helpful. It’s important to have something in the middle of the term so the teacher can adjust their technique because every class is different; every single group of kids is different,” she said.Smith agreed that both are necessary, but was concerned that students would not be able to find the time for PIE, and because of this, PIE would eventually no longer exist. “You have to remember that both the METIC and PIE are student directed initiatives, so my sense is that there may come a point where we want to do away with one or the other, but I think of them as a two different things,” he said. “My concern is that if kids don’t do PIE, if kids start to think it’s burdensome or if they don’t want to take the time, I think as an institution we should drop it because the students came to us and said ‘we want this,’ but if they don’t want to do it, then we shouldn’t do it anymore.”