Student/Teacher Feedback
Alicia shared a ‘student feedback’ form recently. Here students get an opportunity to provide feedback to teaching staff. The feedback is anonymous and is received by the teacher. This feedback is an opportunity for teaching staff to reflect on aspects of their teaching and identify those areas which they would like to develop. This initiative is not happening in isolation and will ultimately be linked up with the development of ‘principles of great teaching’ which Dan has been leading and next year to the introduction of ‘coaching for better teaching’.
Below I have shared the feedback from my S3scV chemistry group which they gave as a final reflection activity. I have tweaked the questions to focus on the chemistry course, rather than on the teacher. Here is a flavour of the educational experience the kids are commenting on:
Student centred:- throughout all lessons students are active and learning is a social experience based on inquiry and problem solving…..Most importantly!!
No note taking
No chalk and talk
Spaced retrieval:- every lesson students practice ‘core chemistry skills’
Critical reflection: every lesson before, during and after all class activities
Generation of empirical data: every lesson at least one aspect of design, data collection, data processing, analysing & evaluating data
Short research projects:- (to discover how chemists use empirical data)
How chemists explain ‘macro’ phenomena in terms of micro models
How do chemists apply chemistry models to solve real life problems
Intentional dialogue: every lesson, prompted by worksheets / discussion of the generation of empirical data etc
So what did they think and what am I going to do about it?……..see student feedback and my action plan below:
Summary:
The students are thinking about what they learn and how they learn it.
They like the course, they like what they learn and how they learn it
They are not fond of writing up the coursework for homework
Action: So what am I going to do
More of the same and try to convince colleagues to come and watch my lessons and give me feedback.
I am not convinced that writing up coursework in class is the best idea, but am open to providing more opportunities to ‘scaffold’ the process in future….I’ll have a think about it.
I’m going to tweak the feedback document and base it on the ‘principles of great teaching’ that Dan is going to present next bimester.