Each week, the Faculty Collaborative for Teaching will bring you an easy-to-implement tool that you can use immediately in your classroom teaching. The goals of these tips will be to broaden your teaching toolbox, share resources on teaching, and alert you to upcoming teaching and learning opportunities from the Faculty Collaborative.

TUESDAY TEACHING TIP: Mid-Course Feedback

Our Week 5 Tuesday Teaching Tip encourages the practice of gathering input from your students. You set the syllabus at the start of the quarter, and now you can invite them to provide you with feedback about their experience in the course so far. For your students, mid-course feedback increases their sense of agency in the course and can improve their overall motivation.

For you, mid-course feedback communicates that you care about your students' learning experience, and it allows you to make adjustments, if necessary, or to explain why you’ve set the class up a certain way if you cannot make the adjustments they suggest. If nothing else, soliciting mid-course feedback can serve as an important dialogue between you and your students.

This week, we challenge you to include a mid-course evaluation in your class(es) -- regardless of the topic or course.

Here’s one way to do it 

• Think of a feedback prompt (we’ve given you a few suggestions below).
• Save the last 5 minutes of the class period.
• Before the class leaves, pass out some note cards or slips of paper for them to provide their answers. You could write the prompt on the board or print on the paper you hand out. For the technologically-minded, you could create a Google Form and then link to it via a QR code for students to respond to on their phones, or set up an anonymous survey in Camino. 
• Collect responses anonymously and reflect: what can you learn about your students' experiences.
• Close the loop: summarize their responses and prepare to discuss what you learned and how you’ll address their comments (or why not) in an upcoming class.

Prompt and Process Suggestions

• Keep / Quit / Start (Nunn, 2018)
• KEEP -- Describe 1-2 practices that take place during class that you would like to see continue.
• QUIT -- Describe any practices that occur during class that detracts from your learning and you would like to see stopped. 
• START -- Describe any practice that would support your learning that you would like me to start using during class. 

• Three Questions (Marx, 2019)
  • What are you having difficulty with?
  • What would you change about the course if you could?
  • When do you learn best in the course?
• Working well/Could work better?
  • What is working well for you in this class to support your learning?
  • Is there anything that could be changed to better support your learning in this class?
• Plus/Delta
  • + What helped you learn today?
  • Δ What should I change to help you learn better?

DID YOU DO IT?

Let us know how it went! We would love to hear your feedback about how you implemented today’s Tuesday Teaching Tip in your classroom. Click here to fill out our 3-question survey.

 WANT TO READ A LITTLE MORE?

• Faculty Collaborative DRT Page on Soliciting Student Feedback

• Nunn, L. (2019) 33 Strategies for Faculty: A Week-by-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation students (ebook from our library)
• Summary of the 33 Strategies
• Marx, R., (2019). Soliciting and utilizing mid-semester feedback. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.

This week’s Tuesday Teaching Tip was prepared by Justin Boren and Patti Simone on behalf of the Faculty Collaborative.

Missed a teaching tip? Read them all here:

• Teaching Tip #1 - Reflection (January 30, 2024)

And check out our full calendar of CAFEs and other Faculty Development and Faculty Collaborative events.