Many faculty dread their course evaluations — some can’t bring themselves to open them at all. That avoidance is understandable, but it comes at a real cost, because good feedback, received and processed well, is one of the best ways to grow.
Part of what makes evaluations so hard is the negativity bias: we register and ruminate on critical comments far more than appreciative ones. Four unkind remarks can overshadow twenty-six thoughtful ones. It’s also worth remembering that student ratings have documented biases — by instructor gender, race, and course difficulty — so they should never be the only measure of how your teaching is going.
A few approaches help. Ask a trusted colleague to read your evaluations first and summarize them by theme, filtering out comments that are purely inflammatory. When you engage with feedback directly, do it when you have emotional reserve — not when you’re exhausted or stressed. Treat the comments as data, not verdict, and look for patterns across multiple responses rather than fixating on outliers.
Student feedback, for all its imperfections, is a form of attention — students telling you how they experience your teaching. That’s a gift, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Teaching has always been emotional work. The goal isn’t to stop feeling the anxiety, the self-doubt, or the sting of a bad evaluation. The goal is to understand those feelings well enough that they inform your teaching rather than derail it — and to keep showing up, keep taking risks, and keep doing work that matters.