Evaluating and Improving Your Teaching

Feedback
Course Evaluations and the Q
Documenting Your Teaching

Teaching is a learning process, and it is impossible to conduct a productive class without input from the students. Experience enables teachers to observe their students with accuracy and insight, and to incorporate their students’ observations and feedback into their teaching.

FEEDBACK

Mid-Term Feedback

The most common way to obtain feedback on teaching is to have students complete a questionnaire. Doing this at the middle of the term will allow you to take feedback into account most usefully. The easiest way to collect early feedback is through your course iSite. You can also design your own questionnaire to obtain mid-term feedback, use a form from the Bok Center website, or work with the Bok Center to design a questionnaire that is tailored to your section. Questionnaires available on the Bok Center website can be administered in class or online and then sent directly to the Bok Center to preserve anonymity. It is recommended that you make an appointment to interpret your evaluations with a consultant (it is easy to give too much weight to that one negative comment!) who will also help to suggest changes on the basis of the responses.

Other In-Class Techniques

End the class ﬁve minutes early on occasion and ask your students to write the answers to a few questions about the class. To get feedback on speciﬁc content, you can ask the following:

•   What were the main points of today’s class?

•   What points were confusing or unclear?

•    What might help to clear up the confusion?

To get feedback on your teaching in this way, you might ask the following:

•   What do you like most about section meetings in this course?

•   What do you like least about section meetings in this course?

•   What suggestions do you have for me as your teaching fellow?

Another way to obtain feedback is to ask students to work in pairs for a few minutes to recapitulate what you have been presenting. Their reports will give you some insight into making adjustments in your approach to presentation.

Responding to Feedback

Once you have collected your students’ feedback, you can respond to it by making speciﬁc changes in your classroom practice. One useful response is to discuss the feedback with your students and let them know that you are acting on it. Some TFs compile a summary of students’ responses and distribute it to the class; students then have a sense of what their peers think and can see that you take their feedback seriously. If students have reported that they are often confused, for example, you can encourage them to ask questions more often and even tell them effective ways to ask for your help. Discussing their feedback with them demonstrates that you actually want to improve the class and that you welcome their participation in doing so. Such a conversation can bring about constructive change and is usually much appreciated.

Timing and Design

The timing and design of written feedback instruments have a strong impact on their usefulness. Mid-term evaluations are much more likely to be useful than those collected after the course ends. In the middle of the semester, it is apparent to students that you can still use their feedback to make improvements to the class, so they have more incentive to give you thorough and constructive responses.

Peer Feedback Through Observation

Teaching fellows often ﬁnd it helpful to visit and observe other classes, including sections led by other TFs in the same course or classes in their department that they know are taught well. Discussing observations with these teachers after the class meeting is an important way to reﬂect on teaching techniques. In addition, you may ask others to observe classes you teach and to offer suggestions.

COURSE EVALUATIONS AND THE Q

The Q

The Committee on Undergraduate Education, in partnership with the Office for Faculty Affairs, conducts a major course evaluation program at the end of every semester in which students provide feedback on their courses. The results are summarized in the Q Guide . Sections are evaluated as well as lectures, labs and tutorials. Section leaders can access copies of their own students’ evaluations online. This end-of-term feedback will be most meaningful and constructive if you have taken earlier steps to communicate to your students that you welcome their feedback.

Reading the Q Guide is also one way to stay informed about the student perspective generally. Seeing what students appreciate (and complain) about in a variety of courses will suggest what to pay attention to in your own teaching and guide you toward more useful feedback.

Consequences of Unsuccessful Teaching

The Ofﬁce of Undergraduate Education may contact teaching fellows who receive very low Q scores urging them to seek appropriate advice from their course heads and from the Bok Center about how to improve their teaching. Although it is understood that a single unsuccessful evaluation may not be signiﬁcant, continued low ratings may be cause for excluding a TF from further teaching in FAS.

DOCUMENTING YOUR TEACHING

Increasingly, search committees at colleges and universities consider teaching experience and expertise to be signiﬁcant factors in a desirable faculty proﬁle. There is evidence that in a competitive market, when other things are equal, the candidate with a strong, documented teaching record will be offered jobs. The Bok Center and the Ofﬁce of Career Services strongly advise TFs to start develop their own teaching portfolios early in their teaching careers at Harvard.

You can begin the process during a regular teaching consultation at the Bok Center. The Bok Center staff will be happy to talk with you about how you might design a teaching portfolio to document your ongoing teaching efforts, incorporating a template developed for the typical Harvard experience. You should consider taking some initial steps even before you begin formal work on a portfolio:

•   Save all syllabi, handouts, and assignments from courses you teach.

•   Develop a statement of your “teaching philosophy.” Employers often request these, and the strongest are those that are well thought out and directly relate to your classroom experiences.

•   Request letters from professors for whom you have taught, especially those who have observed your teaching. Do this while professors’ memories of your work are still fresh.

•   When a course is over, and there is no appearance of impropriety or favoritism, you might also request letters from students. The advisability of this varies by ﬁeld, however, and it best to check with your course head.

•   Consider having your sections videotaped as part of a consultation at the Bok Center. You may ask to keep a copy of the tape since videotaped segments of teaching are sometimes offered to supplement, or as substitute for, an onsite job talk.

•   Keep all student evaluations of your teaching. The combination of midterm evaluations using forms you develop yourself or obtain from the Bok Center with ﬁnal Q evaluations make a good package. If a course is too small for Q evaluations, create and administer your own evaluation form to ensure documentation of your teaching.