The Best Teachers at The Higher School of Economics

Laboratory staff were included in the list of the Best Teachers - 2021 according to the students' assessment.

The traditional election of the best teacher of the Higher School of Economics in 2021 took place.During the elections, students voted online in the LMS "Assess Your Courses" module, immediately following the mandatory module-based faculty and course assessment procedure. Each student could indicate as the best no more than two lecturers and no more than two teachers of seminars / workshops.

Laboratory staff - Alena Zolotareva and Evgeny Osin - became the Best Teachers according to student's assessment.

"There is a lot of uncertainty in the work of a teacher. The content of the course, the nature of tasks, the ratio of different topics and forms of work - all this is determined by us. You have to learn in practice: not a single pedagogy course will tell you what works well for this particular discipline and for these students, So I’m never sure what the result is, and only feedback from students helps to understand that my course turned out to be interesting and useful for someone.

Of course, being named among the best is important and pleasant. But this is not a reason to rest on your laurels or, not being on this list, to think what you did wrong. Psychometrics and probability theory say that the result of this kind of assessment always depends not only on the quality of my work, but also on how many programs in different departments I taught this year and how this time the random measurement error spread. Based on the results of the ten previous years, I was included in this list in at least one category with a probability of 0.7, but there has never been such a thing in three categories at once.

This is very unexpected for me, because this year I gave lectures in a remote asynchronous format for the first time. The coronavirus pandemic made it possible to redesign the course, improve the examples and finally record a video in two languages. However, there were a number of difficulties, I see that there is still a lot to be improved in the course in order to put it in the public domain, so I am pleasantly surprised that my course "entered" in the new format. In addition to the student grade, there is also a behavioral indicator: the course ended in March, and views of key fragments continue to grow during the holidays. This means that this first remote pancake did not come out very lumpy.

Absolutely all student reviews are useful in one way or another, especially those that relate to problems. Some of these problems are “eternal”: my course is read at once for several master's programs, some of which train researchers, others - practitioners, psychologists with basic training in the field of mathematics come to them, as well as humanities who hear the word “standard deviation” for the first time ... Therefore, for some, lectures seem too complicated and overloaded, while others, on the contrary, want more details and more advanced topics. By the ratio of opposing critical reviews, I can understand that, on the whole, I maintain the correct trajectory - such that a person with any background would find, choose and take something new and useful out of the course.

Another part of the problems is associated with the transition of the course to a distance format, and here feedback from students helps to better understand what is missing in the first place in order to take action in the near future - in my case, to develop new test tasks, to more clearly differentiate the mandatory and additional parts material, taking into account the specifics of different programs, introduce forums for interactive discussion of material on SmartLMS. Comments like “we were not told exactly how to do it right” and “we had to study on our own” amuse a little: friends, as soon as you start writing scientific articles, you will understand that you will always be like this!

Student Teacher Assessment (STA or "SOP" in Russia) is certainly a useful practice, and it is not without reason that it is widely used in the world. Critics say that the results of the STA are not related to actual knowledge output and that this practice encourages teachers to lower the level of requirements in order to please the students. There is some truth in this. But it is important to remember that today the result of a training course is not so much knowledge of formulas and recipes, but a vision of alternative opportunities for one's development as a specialist within a specific discipline and motivation to use these opportunities independently and actively. And with this intrinsic motivation for self-development, which is only important in the long term, it seems to me that the results of the STA correlate much more strongly than with specific knowledge, which, unfortunately, tend to be forgotten right after the exam, no matter how hard the teacher tries to drive them into the heads of the students.

STA, like any other tool, should not be absolutized: it must always be viewed in context in order to get the most out of it. Perhaps, it is not the STA itself that needs improvement, but how we use its results. I am a little familiar with teaching at British universities, and there the teacher writes a short reflection after the end of the course: what the feedback from students speaks about, what this time I did well when reading the course, and what is not very good, what is the reason for critical reviews, you can whether to change anything to improve the experience of interacting with the course for prospective students, and if so, what exactly do I plan to do differently the next time I read this course. It would be cool to create some kind of framework for this kind of reflection, but so that it was not just another obligatory report for the sake of a report, but an opportunity, if you want, among fellow teachers to share your successful recipes, fresh mistakes and thoughts about how to fix them.

It seems to me that it is very important not to discount STAs. No matter how ideally the course is read, critical reviews from students will be - and should be - always, it is not a shame to receive them. On the contrary, the reason for thinking should rather be the complete absence of detailed feedback. In higher education we face very difficult tasks, and we, like that pianist from the anecdote, solve them as best we can. And so that we can solve them better, we need students who honestly tell us how this experience of our communication turned out to be for them".