Respond to Evaluations
Convert a semester's course evaluations into a defensible teaching-improvement plan. Cluster free-text comments into themes, weight each theme by how many independent students raised it, classify what to do about it, and draft specific changes pointed at the syllabus and deck — so next semester's revision is a checklist, not a vibe.
Posture (echoes /respond-to-referees): one angry comment is not a trend, and a comment you disagree with is a signal to investigate, not a license to ignore or to auto-act. A single student's frustration may be the only one willing to say what twenty felt — frequency weights the theme, it does not gate it. Ground truth here is a process: the plan records why a theme was kept or changed, so the reasoning survives to the next round.
When to use
- End of term, when numeric scores + open-text comments land and you want a revision plan, not a mood.
- Assembling a teaching dossier / tenure file where you must show you acted on feedback.
- Mid-stream (early-semester feedback) to course-correct before the term ends.
Not for: writing the syllabus from scratch (use /syllabus), or reviewing one deck's pedagogy (use /pedagogy-review).
Inputs
$0 — the evaluation file(s): a CSV/TSV export, .txt/.md of pasted comments, or a .pdf/.docx report.$1 (optional) — the prior improvement plan, so this round is a diff (did last term's changes land?).
| Format | How to read |
|---|
.csv, .tsv, .txt, .md | Read directly; for CSV, note which column is numeric vs free-text. |
.pdf | TMP=$(mktemp -d)/evals.txt && pdftotext "$0" "$TMP" (poppler). Read/grep "$TMP". |
.docx | TMP=$(mktemp -d)/evals.txt && pandoc "$0" -t plain -o "$TMP". |
If extraction fails or a tool is missing, ask for a plain-text export and stop. A scanned or partly scanned PDF extracts with exit 0 and blank pages, so also compare pdfinfo "$0" | grep Pages with the pages that returned text (awk 'BEGIN{RS="\f"} NF{n++} END{print n+0}' "$TMP"); read any blank pages directly with Read, or ask for a text version, and if you go on without them, say which pages were not read. When you are done, delete the extracted copy (rm -rf "$(dirname "$TMP")"): it is a plaintext copy of the document.
Phases
Phase 0: Load evals + prior plan (Pre-Flight)
Read the eval file(s) and the prior plan (if given). Produce a short Pre-Flight block before clustering:
## Pre-Flight Report
**Evals loaded:** N responses (M with free-text), instrument: [name/term]
**Numeric items:** [list each scale item + mean, and the institution/department mean if present]
**Prior plan:** [path, or "none — first round"] — changes promised last term: [bullet list]
**Course artifacts in scope:** [syllabus path] · [deck(s) under Slides/ or Quarto/]
Numbers anchor the read but do not override text: a 4.2/5 with ten "I was lost by week 6" comments is a problem the mean is hiding.
Phase 1: Theme-cluster + weight by frequency
- Split free-text into atomic comments (one student may raise several themes; one comment may belong to several themes).
- Cluster into themes (e.g., pacing, problem-set difficulty, grading clarity, real-world relevance, office hours, prerequisite gaps). Name each theme in the instructor's words, not the student's.
- For each theme record: mention count (distinct students), representative verbatim quote (~25 words, anonymized — strip names/identifying detail), valence (positive / negative / mixed), and numeric corroboration (which scale item, if any, moves with it).
- Signal vs noise: a theme with
< --min-mentions (default 2) distinct students is tagged low-frequency, not dropped — it carries to Phase 2 for a Keep/Investigate call. Frequency weights; it never silences.
Phase 2: Classify + propose changes
Assign each theme exactly one label (the teaching analogue of /respond-to-referees' coverage matrix):
| Label | Meaning | Drives |
|---|
| Keep | Working well; protect it from collateral damage when you change other things. | A "do not break" note. |
| Change | Clear, agreed problem with a concrete fix you can name. | A specific syllabus/deck edit. |
| Investigate | Real signal but root cause unclear, or you disagree with the proposed remedy — gather evidence (a mid-term pulse poll, a look at the grade distribution, peer observation) before acting. | An investigation step, not an edit. |
| Out-of-scope | Outside your control (room, time slot, required textbook, prerequisite course) or contrary to a deliberate pedagogical choice you stand behind. | A documented rationale, not a change. |
For each Change, write a concrete revision mapped to a target: syllabus §X / Slides/LectureNN.tex slide K / a new worked example / an assessment reweighting — the same point-to-the-location discipline /respond-to-referees uses for "we added X on page Y". For Investigate, name the evidence you'll collect and the decision rule. For Out-of-scope, write the one-sentence rationale you'd stand behind in a dossier.
Disagreement is explicit and reasoned: "Students asked to drop proofs; retained because the course's stated objective is derivation fluency — added two scaffolded worked examples (LectureNN slide K) to ease the on-ramp instead" is a Keep-with-mitigation, not an Out-of-scope dismissal.
Phase 3: Save the improvement plan
Write the plan to quality_reports/teaching/YYYY-MM-DD_[course]_improvement-plan.md. Structure:
- Header — course, term, instrument, response rate, numeric summary vs benchmark.
- Prior-plan retrospective (if
$1 given) — for each change promised last term: Landed / Partial / Not done, with the evidence from this term's evals.
- Theme matrix — one row per theme: theme · mentions · valence · numeric corroboration · classification · target (syllabus §/deck slide) · representative quote.
- Change list — the concrete edits, ordered by mention count then severity, each pointing at a syllabus section or deck/slide.
- Investigate list — open questions + the evidence to collect next.
The plan is a deliverable, not a transient report, so it lives under quality_reports/teaching/ and feeds next term's $1.
Phase 3.5: Post-Flight Verification (quotes + targets)
The plan's hallucination-prone content is (a) verbatim quotes attributed to students and (b) "edit syllabus §X / LectureNN slide K" targets that must actually exist. Run the fresh-context verifier protocol in .claude/rules/post-flight-verification.md: spawn claim-verifier (fresh context, never a conversation fork) with the quotes + the eval source and the edit-targets + the syllabus/deck paths. Reconcile — a quote that isn't in the source, or a "slide K" that doesn't exist, is corrected or dropped before the plan is final. Opt-out: --no-verify (not recommended).
Output / Report
After writing the plan, surface this in your final chat message (not inside the plan file):
## Teaching-improvement summary — [course], [term]
Themes: K total — C Change · I Investigate · P Keep · O Out-of-scope
Top 3 changes (by mentions): 1) … 2) … 3) …
Open investigations: …
Prior plan: x of y promised changes landed.
If all themes are classified and every Change names a target, say All themes classified; every Change mapped to a syllabus or deck target.
Exit behavior
- A theme with no classification halts the report — there are no orphans, exactly as
/respond-to-referees admits no unclassified concern.
- Read-only on the syllabus and decks: this skill plans edits and writes the plan file; it does not edit teaching materials. Apply changes deliberately afterward (with
/create-lecture or direct edits).
- Numbers never auto-override text and text never auto-overrides numbers; conflicts become Investigate, not a silent winner.
Flags
--min-mentions — distinct-student threshold below which a theme is tagged low-frequency (default 2). Lowering it surfaces more singletons; it never drops them.--no-verify — skip Phase 3.5 Post-Flight Verification of quotes and edit-targets. Not recommended for a dossier-bound plan.
Cross-references
What this skill does NOT do
- It does not edit the syllabus or any deck — it produces a plan; you (or
/create-lecture) apply it.
- It does not compute new numeric scores or re-weight the instrument; it reads the institution's numbers as given.
- It does not identify students or attempt to de-anonymize comments — quotes are stripped of identifying detail.
- It does not auto-act on disagreement or on a single comment; both route to Investigate or a documented rationale.