What can educators do?

In this section, we’ll look at your student feedback and do some hands on exercises. The first thing that we’re going to do is have a look at your feedback and be prepared to be objective. And one of the ways that can help you to be objective is to use a coding scheme so that as you’re reading it, you’re labeling each piece of feedback. So I’ve suggested using the following five codes. Assessment design. These are for comments that students might make about the assessment, the assessment experience, the assessment instructions. The next one is course content. These would be any comments that students say, you know “Week three was useful. Week six was a waste of time.” The next one is course design. So any sort of feedback that students give you about pace or relevance or, you know, useful exercises versus things that they really enjoyed. The fourth one is anything about your approach to teaching. These would be comments specifically about ways you approached different classroom exercises or the way that you reacted to questions, particularly around assessment ’cause that’s always a hotspot. And the fifth one is for student support. So anything that has to do with emotional support or support with academic skills. These five codes can then help you to see all the feedback specifically for different purposes, which will help you later when we move on to actions.

So once you’ve waded through all of your student feedback, take a break, see how you feel. And when you’re ready, consider other data inputs. So I’ve put together nine possible data inputs that you could consider using. And it’s really important to include another data stream alongside of feedback because this helps you to either confirm what the students were saying. “So yes, you know, I can see that assessment two was an issue because that was also a week that I had heavy email traffic about that.” You can also use it to debunk or reframe some of the feedback that you got. So, you may have gotten comments about something but that wasn’t what you noticed elsewhere. Or, maybe there was a time of day that didn’t work for the students. And you can confirm that based on your student demographics. So try and use the second data stream to make sense of what you’ve been told.

And because we really wanna be triangulating the data, the third reference point that you might wanna use is your self-reflection. It’s okay to agree or disagree with your students. So have a think about, okay, what they’re saying is logical or what they’re saying isn’t logical. And here’s why. Because what you might find is that you’re teaching in a certain way, but you haven’t made that explicit. In which case, making things explicit, in that example, could be an action point for your future delivery.

So I’ve put together a table below. And in the table I’ve included the codes that I mentioned previously. And I also have explicit columns for the student feedback, the data from the other sources and your reflection. And I wanna call out that it’s really important that we have the pros and cons for both of these because oftentimes we tend to focus on the cons. So with your pros, these are things that you want to pause and be proud of. Maybe consider sharing them with others, so that you’re sharing your best practice with colleagues. And through those conversations you might also find ways to overcome your cons. But keep in mind as well that don’t skip out on the self-reflection part either because it’s completely acceptable to agree or disagree with the feedback that you’re getting.

And in those examples where you’re disagreeing, you might start to unpack things that you can do better. For example, if students don’t like the way that you delivered assessment two. You might say, “Well, they’re wrong, and here’s why.” And what you need to do with that feeling is turn that into your overt instruction the next time you deliver it. Try to explain to students why you’re doing things in a certain way. And that’s just a really basic example of how you can use the feedback to make iterative improvements along the way. So it’s important that you’re completing this table because the information that we use from this space, we’ll use to make informed actions in the next lesson.