AAPT Members

I have just completed running a three-day faculty workshop on the Reacting to the Past pedagogy here at McDaniel. I’ve been using the Athens game in my Critical Thinking course for a couple of years. It is an unbelievably effective technique to increase engagement.
There is a twist, however: my end-of-term evaluations from this past class were the worst I’ve ever received. I have my theories as to why - but I think it raises the question if those forms are, by any stretch of the imagination, externally valid. It seems to me that when you have students active arguing about passages of the Republic, or coming to understand that their previous beliefs about Darwin were totally inaccurate and incoherent, we’ve done something.
The students, however, report that they haven’t learned much, and would have preferred a standard lecture course. Students seem to think that if you can’t put it on a flashcard, it isn’t really knowledge. At what point do the demands of students, channeled through the teaching evaluation forms and the tenure process undermine real education?