Measuring Teaching Performance
As a classroom instructor, you have the opportunity to reflect on your performance in an ongoing manner, which is to say that you can invite informal student feedback at any point during your course; verbally and/ or in written form. This way, you are not reliant on the final student evaluations as the only measure of your impact on the learning of your students. Continuous invitations to your students to share their perspectives allow you to make necessary adjustments as soon as need for those arises.
Take the time to read the feedback that you get, so that you can plan adequate follow-up actions. Give yourself the freedom to “hear’ all voices and appreciate the honesty of your students who point out things that don’t seem to work for them. Receiving less than enthusiastic feedback is only hard if you take it personally. Rather focus on the fact that teaching is a process, not a finite point, and thus requires adjustments as you and your students go through it. Keep in mind that not all students are trained in providing constructive feedback. They often depend on your guidance in that process.
An example of how you can probe the effectiveness of your teaching is the EXIT ticket activity at the end of a specific class or phase in your course. During that brief activity, you can ask students to jot down some answers to questions similar to the ones below. Do try to limit your questions to a maximum of 3 in order for the feedback to stay succinct. You could also prepare multiple choice questions for even quicker response rates. The exit ticket activity can be delivered on a sheet of paper or with the help of an online tool like Active Quiz in Moodle, Plickers or the free Classroom Response System PINGO:
- Name 1 – 3 things that you take out of this class today.
- What is the activity that most helped you learn today’s concepts?
- What did you learn today that most surprised you?
- What happened in today’s class that made learning difficult?
- Is there still something that you need clarification for?
- What question relating to today’s content do you want to ask the instructor at this point of the course?
If you wish to discuss other ways to obtain constructive feedback from your students, do not hesitate to approach colleagues in your department for best practices ideas and/ or contact the Educational Development Facilitators in the Teaching Centre for assistance.
ULFA – your University Faculty Association has published a Statement on the questionable reliability of final end of term Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) as the primary tool for the evaluation of teaching, with which you can familiarize yourself here.
