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Joel Neff's avatar

One of the frustrations I have with student feedback is that in my working environments, the student surveys are often written without direct input from the teachers. In other words, I don't really get to ask about the things I think are important. Instead, I tend to receive fairly generic feedback that, taken as a whole, doesn't amount to much.

As a result, I have been making up small surveys that I deploy throughout the semester. I try to make them innocuous so that the students don't feel any pressure to give me the answer I want to hear. I ask questions like, "If you had to present this chapter of the book, what would you focus on? Why?" I've had mixed results, with a lot of students treating it like homework and giving the bare minimum answer. But when I get a substantive answer from students, it tends to be something I can, or maybe should, address in my teaching. But that does depend, of course, on finding the right question in the first place.

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Mark R DeLong's avatar

Thanks for this post, David. We're circulating student evaluations now, and to me they feel more perfunctory and ritualistic than anything. I have chosen to devote the last class session to a much more thorough and tailored review of the class and my choices during its run. Since my course is a seminar, I also have the chance to sound out successes, failures, and blunders throughout the semester. But the last course dissects the readings, the projects, the assignments, the interactions much more thoroughly and discursively than any checkbox'ed form can do. (Class size and familiarity with each other help to provide a safe space for the students, too.). I've also used the last class session to float ideas for changes in the seminar by the students, just to see what they think. They're insightful especially after having gone through a semester's study, so the students do have an influence on ways to improve the course.

I can't expect much from the normal evaluations. The tactic I've used has been informative and useful.

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