
Rachel Jameton
- 208-792-2597
- [email protected]
- MLH 305
Midterm is a great time for reflection with your students for the purpose of improving the classroom environment and teaching/learning experience during the current semester. It is at the classroom level and not shared with administration, and thus it is a low stakes way of enhancing your teaching practice.
There are many reasons to check in with your students at midterm such as:
There are many different ways to gather feedback in-class or online, quickly or with more depth. In most cases, a quick check-in with students is sufficient, and those are the first two examples on this list. If you have recently changed something fundamental about your class or are working on solving a sticky teaching problem, you may be interested in the third and fourth method. Let the CTL know if you'd like any help with either of those.
Students can write any of these of a piece of paper in class, or use whichever online survey tool you prefer.
There are so many ways to ask "what do you like, or not like, about this class, and what could we do better?" Here are a few suggestions from faculty"
Question set 1
Question set 2
Question set 3
An outside observer, such as a CTL peer observer, conducts a single large group discussion with your class during class time. The faculty and observer identify two or three questions to ask, and the observer collects responses anonymously. This process can not only result in more honest answers than you are able to collect from a survey, but also gives students ownership of their class. For more information, see Yale's SGFS page.
SGID can be carried out by CTL faculty, or you can do it yourself. There are many approaches, and this one is a response to our brain's tendency to focus on the negative evals.
This is the most important part. You have to read the feedback forms and actually change something, and this can be very hard. Even one or two negative responses in a class can make responding very difficult. If you find yourself challenged by reading the forms, you may want to try SGIDs.
Here is a suggested approach to responding, which can also be applied to SCEs.
Action | Example |
Throw out the off-the-wall comments that do not provide you with useful information and forget about them. | "You need to update your wardrobe." |
Set aside the positive comments that don't tell you anything specific. | "I love this class!" |
Divide the negative comments into two groups: those you can change and those that you cannot change. Change the things you can. | Can Change: changing a due date for online homework from Sunday night to Monday morning. Cannot Change: the discussion focus of the class. |
Focus and capture positive responses to pedagogy to talk with students about your approaches. | "The class discussions are really helping me go deeper into the reading." |
Work on perceptions and learn to be explicit. | If your students ask for things that you are already doing, or ask for you to change the class structure, it is possible that you will need to have more conversations about how the class works and why. |
This is where you empower your students by making a requested change, and thank them. You can do it in-person, in a recorded message, or in an email. No matter which you do, a gracious tone is, of course, important. Try to take the feedback seriously, but not personally.