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Reflect on Your Teaching

How are we doing as teachers? We ask ourselves that question so that we can continually strive for excellence, and others ask that question to assist or assess our progress. This web page contains resources to support you in getting helpful feedback from your students and colleagues, to help you reflect on that feedback, and also to help you document your teaching for purposes of tenure and promotion.

 

Gathering Feedback from Students

Mid-Semester Feedback Survey (CTE has created two Mid-Semester Feedback survey options. These are available as PDFs or as Quizzes from Canvas Commons)

Anonymous Feedback Box (CTE has developed instructions on how to embed an Office 365 form an embed it into a Canvas page) 

(suggestions for reacting to comments on interim and final student evaluations, from Stanford)

(offers a variety of helpful suggestions for ways to get ongoing feedback from your students)

Beware of putting too much emphasis on student evaluations, though.  One careful showed that more experienced teachers got lower student evaluations, but that their students performed better on follow-up advanced courses.

 

Using Peer Feedback

While student evaluations are helpful in some respects, they are an insufficient and incomplete way to assess teaching. See Donald P. Hoyt & William H. Pallett, (a paper from the Idea Center). Colleagues are another important additional source of constructive and informative feedback on teaching.

These contain advice about setting up individual or departmental peer observation and feedback:

(guidelines and forms from the University of Minnesota)

(extensive advice from UT)

(downloadable manual with forms and guidelines for setting up a departmental program)

 

Understanding Your Own Teaching Goals & Philosophy

These tools are intended to help you become more aware of what you want to accomplish in a particular course and to provide a starting point for discussion of teaching and learning among colleagues.

"," from George Mason University contains a number of useful resources for creating a teaching statement, including issues to consider and sample statements.

 from the University of Iowa

 

Creating a Teaching Portfolio

Document the quality and nature of your teaching by collecting appropriate material for a teaching portfolio.

(overview and advice from the teaching center at Vanderbilt)  

Kenneth Wolf writes in the journal Educational Leadership:

Assessing Students

(advice from Carnegie Mellon on using using baseline knowledge to learn when you need to correct misunderstanding and so you can evaluate what they've learned in the course)

(overview and methods, also from Carnegie Mellon)

(this resource contains a helpful chart keyed to Bloom's taxonomy)

(ideas from Vanderbilt: find out during class if they're getting it)

Rubrics

(a wealth of ideas, tips, and examples from LCI, Learner-Centered Initiatives)

(templates, grading, and more)

(Rubrics for fourteen of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Essential Learning Outcomes, including Intellectual and Practical Skills, Personal and Social Responsibility, and Integrative Learning)

Grading

(and links to the book, Tools for Teaching, from Berkeley)

(thorough advice from Vanderbilt)

(Vanderbilt) 

(to help you name your exam characters)