Today my teaching was evaluated.

It was pretty nerve-wracking, really, knowing that it was coming. I think I was maybe second or third, though I’d thought beforehand that I was first. I didn’t think much about the relative benefits (real or imagined) of being first, or not, but it was nonetheless nerve-wracking.

Well, my supervisor qualified his evaluation pretty heavily beforehand, saying it was just one person’s opinion of one class session on one day—for he did it alone, and only during my 4:30pm class today. And sure, I got to choose which class he would evaluate—naturally, my best class, as everyone was choosing their best group.

Honestly, I will admit that, knowing the evaluation was coming, I made a slightly more self-conscious effort to evaluate the various teaching methods I used, the exercises and so on, but to be honest, I didn’t do anything different from what I normally do. It was pretty much a regular session for that particular class.

Which means that there were moments when I was in control of the whole group, as well as moments when the students were working in pairs and, aurally, the room was utter chaos, while I engaged with pairs one by one. I was a little self-conscious about that, but then again that’s basically what I do and I’d rather be evaluated on what I do, and be offered some other strategies if it’s not working.

Well, perhaps it actually is working. The feedback I got was quite positive, really. There was only one rating which was less than I hoped, and that was pertaining to my method of correction—something I have been thinking about lately anyway. So I am pretty pleased with this: it means that, perhaps, I have somewhat fewer blind spots in the classroom than I sometimes imagine.

And the end result of this? I’ve been thinking about the role of evaluative procedures in the classroom. I think I don’t test my students enough, which is why lately I’ve been surprising them with spot quizzes. These are oral quizzes, mind you, mainly me asking them to perform conversations of the kind we’ve practiced recently and which I’ve explicitly assigned—one might say I warned—them to practice together before next class.

I remember when my friend Seong Hwan was my student for a little while. I asked him what I was doing wrong with the class, for it was a low-level class that was struggling with things like motivation. HE told me that they needed tests; they needed to be tested periodically. At the time, I thought about that negatively: “But they’ve chosen to take the class? Why can’t they self-motivate? And why should I test when it’s not a credit-based class? How silly!” And how silly of me! I even went to the point of deciding that perhaps it was a case of the students being so conditioned by the Korean education system (which is full of standardized tests) that they couldn’t learn without having tests thrown at them.

But isn’t it basically human to want feedback? And doesn’t feedback—the weakening fear of maybe doing terribly (something one staff member was reporting feeling even though he’d been doing this work for five years and knows what he is doing) a powerful incentive to try really hard to do well? And isn’t the compassionate encouragement of the evaluator who is much less harsh on you than you imagine, the experience of doing something and having those moments when you’re painfully aware of your weaker points—help you think out what you need to improve or make you think about how you could do something better?

If you think about it that way, evaluations and feedback are really a kind of clever psychological trick or ritual one can use on people to extract better work from them, which is probably why practically every workplace in the world uses them. But for me today, the object lesson is this: that it can also be used on students, and it ought to be, more often than I use it anyway.