Have you ever looked out at a class of students and wondered, “I know I am trying hard to teach this class well. Is all my effort actually working?” This post addresses a useful strategy for finding out. The goal is to improve your student’s experience in your classes while still maintaining your role in making pedagogical and coverage choices. Right now, in the middle of the semester, is the perfect time to ask. The students have enough experience to have formed opinions, and you have enough time to make changes to improve things.
The strategy involves four steps: (1) asking for feedback from your students, (2) aggregating your students’ responses into data you can use, (3) deciding how to address the students’ feedback, and (4) reporting out the data to your students and your decisions regarding any changes the students have asked for. The remainder of this post provides best practices for each step.
Asking for Feedback. It is helpful to include a mix of open-ended and close-ended questions. I typically ask two open-ended questions: (1) What am I doing in class that is helping you learning? and (2) What can I do to better help you learn? My closed-ended questions typically ask students how many hours per week they are spending studying in my class and to place a check mark next to each item in a list of techniques I have used in the class if they would like me to continue using that technique. I always do the survey on paper (and encourage any student who would prefer to or who can only respond electronically to do so and deliver their responses to a law school administrative assistant). I pass out my survey before class starts, explain the purpose of the survey, and emphasize anonymity. I promise to report out the data, including any criticisms, and I promise to either make any change a significant number of students would like to see me make or to explain why I am not making that change. My response rate typically is above 70%.
Aggregating Your Students’ Responses Into Data. This step is simply a matter of reviewing and tabulating the responses. I note every item of feedback and track how many students have provided that particular piece of feedback. One warning: some of the feedback may not feel great. It is impossible, at least for me, to teach a class that is working for every student. But I force myself to understand that my purpose in asking for feedback is not to make myself feel good; my purpose is to improve my students’ experience. And I try to think of all feedback as a chance to get better. (I do allow myself to whine a little to my partner and faculty friends about any harsh comments.)
I also always calculate an average of the number of hours my students are spending studying for my class, noting the high number, the low number, and the most common number. We tell our students that they should be studying 2-3 hours outside of class for every hour in class. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how much your students are studying? And wouldn’t it be nice for the students to know how many hours per week their peers are studying?
Deciding How to Use the Feedback. I tell my students that I will be reporting out any aspect of feedback that at least three of them have offered. I therefore either create a few slides in which I report out the hours studying data and the feedback or draft an email to the class to report the data. For each item students have asked me to change, I make a decision whether I will make a change in response. I always make some changes based on the student feedback. It is important to me that my students do not feel that I have wasted their time and am ignoring their input. I also make conscious choices not to change things that I have reason to believe are pedagogically valuable, like many of the things I have written about in these Teaching Tidbit blog posts, and I plan how I will explain those choices.
Reporting the Data to Your Students and Your Decisions about the Changes You Will Make. I report out and comment on the data, making clear which things I am willing to change and which things I am unable or unwilling to change and, most importantly, why. I believe that my students do not expect me to make every teaching change they have suggested, but I believe they do expect me to report the data and explain my decisions.
Explaining my choices not to change has proven to more valuable than I ever had imagined. I believe students can come to respect your choices if they understand them. In fact, I have discovered that students’ concerns about a particular teaching choice (for example, pre-testing) disappear when I explain the studies that justify that choice.
Last Thoughts. As I noted above, some of the feedback may not feel great, but feeling great is not the point. Improving students’ learning in the class is the point. For what it’s worth, many students have told me how much they appreciate my choice to ask for their input and act on it.
