Testimonials

Peer and Student Evaluations

Why This Evidence Matters

Student evaluation data tells one part of the teaching story. What it cannot capture is how a classroom looks and feels from the perspective of a professional observer — a colleague who understands the discipline, knows what skilled teaching requires, and is in a position to evaluate not just whether students seem engaged but whether the pedagogical choices being made are sound, deliberate, and effectively executed.

The testimonials on this page come from two sources whose perspectives are meaningfully different and complementary. The first is a faculty colleague who observed my teaching in a formal peer evaluation context and brings the lens of a fellow political scientist. The second is a student whose experience in my courses extended beyond a single semester and who can speak to the cumulative effect of the pedagogical approach described elsewhere on this site.

These are not curated in the sense of being cherry-picked from a large collection of testimonials. They are the formal peer evaluation and the student endorsement that exist in my teaching file and that I present here as part of the complete evidence record.

Faculty Peer Evaluation

Joe Romance, Former Professor of Political Science, FHSU

What makes a peer evaluation particularly valuable as evidence is that it comes from someone who knows what they are looking at. A colleague who teaches the same discipline can distinguish between an instructor who is entertaining and one who is actually teaching — between student engagement that produces learning and student engagement that substitutes for it. The evaluation on record here reflects that kind of informed professional judgment.

Student Endorsement

Nichole Kotschwar, Former Student

Student perspectives on teaching are sometimes discounted on the grounds that students prefer easy courses and popular instructors over rigorous and demanding ones. That concern is legitimate in the abstract but misreads what substantive student testimonials actually demonstrate. A student who can articulate specifically what they learned, how their thinking changed, and what pedagogical choices produced those outcomes is giving a different kind of evidence than a student satisfaction score. That is the kind of testimony this letter represents.

A Note on This Collection

The two documents linked below represent the formal external evaluation record in my teaching file. They are presented here not as a comprehensive account of how every student or colleague has experienced my teaching — no such account could be comprehensive — but as the structured, attributed, considered judgments of observers who engaged seriously with the question of what my teaching does and how it does it. Readers who want the broader picture of student response should also consult the Teaching Evaluations page, where aggregate data across three institutions and twenty-plus years is presented and contextualized.