This study analyzes end of course institutional teaching evaluations (ITEs) done anonymously by students in a pre-service teacher education course over a 15-year span. The purpose was to determine if and how the ITE findings might inform practice and relate to teaching metaphors as a tool of study. Analysis revealed: (a) teacher effectiveness ratings were more meaningful when examined by metaphor periods and when outliers, which skewed the trends, were removed, (b) patterns in students' optional narrative comments on ITEs indicated that students consistently saw instructor strength in caring and weakness in clarity, (c) there was no clear correlation between narrative comments and teacher effectiveness ratings, and (d) alignment with identified teaching metaphors was strongest with student narrative comment categories. In addition, doing this analysis reframed the way I thought of myself as a teacher and allowed me to make positive changes in how I related to students. Comments from the course in the semester following the analysis support this contention. This work informs the field by considering the usefulness of metaphors for long-term study of practice as well as modeling how teacher educators subjected to accountability measures can use such institutional measures to create meaningful study of practice.