“¡It was my worst course¡” Analysis of student´s experiences with deficient teachers

Abstract

The goal of the research was to describe and analyze deficient teaching based on the answers 193 university students gave to the question “What was your worst course?”, from which we obtained 374 experiences which were analyzed qualitatively using the Hyper Research (version 4.0.3). It employed two categories: one called teaching practices and the other teaching attitudes, from which it was constructed 13 subcategories for the former and 11 for the latter. It describes what happens when teaching is not done in the desired manner. The main results were that the six actions most frequently demonstrated by bad professor were: not fostering learning, not explaining adequately, irresponsibility, the lack of or poor quality of feedback, inadequate forms of evaluation and the students giving the class. It was found some amount of mistreatment of students. The findings are explained using factors that it is knowing fostering learning along with contributions from teaching best practices. It recommends training professors in the aspects we identified as being deficient and designing institutional policies that verify the compliance of teaching functions, with mechanisms by which to identify how students experience their treatment by professors.