Teaching Reviews

Across seven semesters, students have consistently reported that my courses significantly expanded their understanding of the subject: averaging 4.79 out of 5.0, compared to 4.51 for the department and 4.49 for the university. I take particular pride in this measure because knowledge growth is ultimately why students are here. 

Students' assessments of teaching quality have remained well above both benchmarks throughout my time at UR, including near-perfect scores in my first two years. The slight dip in Spring 2024 coincided with a significant course redesign, as well as a number of other campus related activities.  However, even with the slight dip, the excellence in the quality of teaching is apparent with those scores being larger than the University and Departmental averages.

Perhaps the most personal of the three measures: would a student tell a friend to take my course? Two semesters produced a perfect 5.0 on this question, and my seven-semester average of 4.91 reflects something I genuinely value: that students leave not just with new skills, but with an experience they found worth sharing. 

While quantitative scores offer one lens into teaching effectiveness, I've always found that student comments reveal something the numbers can't fully capture: the texture of a classroom, the moments of connection, and the longer arc of how a course shapes a student's thinking. The comments below represent a curated selection from years of reviews at the University of Richmond (MSU is below the MSU charts). Read together, they reflect what I care most about as an educator: meeting students where they are, making technically demanding material genuinely accessible, and building a classroom community where curiosity and honest questions are always welcome. 

Before joining the University of Richmond, I taught at Michigan State University for five years during my Ph.D. studies: first as a lab instructor supporting courses in cartography, GIS, and spatial analysis (graduate level spatial statistics class), and later as Instructor of Record with full responsibility for course design, instruction, and assessment (six new preps). The eleven courses I taught at MSU span a range of levels and subjects, from introductory geography to graduate spatial statistics, and include several taught during the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Across all eleven courses, my overall evaluation average was 4.76 out of 5.0, compared to a departmental average of 4.38. Even during the most challenging semesters of remote instruction, my scores remained above the departmental benchmark:  a consistency I attribute to deliberate course design and staying attentive to how students were navigating an extraordinary set of circumstances. 

Just as I did with the University of Richmond's student comments on the reviews, here are the ones from my time teaching at Michigan State University.  It includes the few lab instructorships and the instructor of records.  Due to the fact that the courses I taught at Michigan State spanned so many different topics, I have broken out these selected quotes by the class it relates too.

In addition to my on-campus teaching at Michigan State, I taught online courses through the department's digital offerings: a mix of undergraduate courses and graduate-level professional coursework delivered through the onGeo program, which serves working GIS professionals across the country. Teaching across both audiences in an online environment sharpened my ability to design clear, self-contained instructional materials and provide feedback that lands without the benefit of a classroom conversation. The table below links directly to my formal performance reviews and raw student evaluation forms from that work.