Teaching Reflections

After a course, you should compile evidence of learning found in student work and reflect upon what it says about the course. It’s challenging to identify weaknesses in an instructional design and plan changes that might benefit future students. In many cases, this process involves making the results of your teaching public and seeking feedback from others. Peer review of teaching provides an occasion for examining the intellectual work of teaching, including constructive feedback on that work from professional peers.

In the process of offering a typical course you’ll likely spend about 50 hours in contact with students (in class, labs, studios or consultations), and probably the same amount of time outside class in preparation, reading student work, and general course management. Rather than discard the products of that substantial amount of time, it’s very useful to set aside some time to write down your impressions of a course. You could comment on which topics or issues you would emphasize more or de-emphasize in your next offering. You could consider how well you felt the assignments, projects, and exams represented the skills and knowledge you hoped to see in your students. Were there particular areas of student work (e.g., assignments, particular exam questions, or dimensions of an assignment rubric) on which students consistently excelled, or seemed to struggle? Making notes about such changes is best accomplished right after the course is over, while the ideas and experiences are still fresh in your mind.

You also can save some representative samples of student work that show what you and they accomplished together. It’s disheartening to a teacher to think that after years of teaching there has been no progress in advancing students’ understanding of our field. If you have a small but accessible record of some key performances from several offerings of a course, you can review them for any trends. Maybe you see some consistent problems that you can address with more time, different materials, or additional practice. Maybe you see some improvement over time that was not apparent to you in the midst of teaching. Ultimately this is why we teach, to help students appreciate and understand our fields as we do. Keeping a small archive allows you to see how you are doing in a longer perspective, and to make examples visible to others. You can use this student consent form to get your students' permission to use their work in representations of your teaching.  

Whatever your field of research or creative activity, you keep archives of your work. You have examples of studio work, lab data, and notes from library visits or interviews; you capture the important products of your inquiry into your field in many ways. Given the amount of time you likely spend each semester on teaching (probably more than 200 hours total for two courses), it would be a shame to lose all the benefits of that work by not developing some record of what was accomplished. The syllabi, assignments, and student work are done anyway, so you should not simply throw them away. Reflecting on and writing out your observations to capture your insights at the moment of greatest understanding is a wise investment. It will help you grow as a teacher and achieve your goals, and ultimately those reflections can document your intellectual work as a teacher.

For more detailed information about how represent and write about evidence of student learning, see this guide, along with examples from a wide range of disciplines. 

A course portfolio represents a teacher’s most effective practices. When teaching is approached as an act of data-driven practice, the course portfolio allows you to explore how effectively the goals of student learning are being achieved, from your point of view and from the perspective of student work. In this way, student and teacher practices inform and serve each other; this relationship is captured in the course portfolio.

The structure of a course portfolio explains course goals, how goals were implemented, how student performance was achieved, and the teacher’s reflection on what was achieved and what can be bettered in future offerings. A richer portfolio tracks a course’s evolution, showing what was learned and what skills improved over time. In contrast to other reviews, students’ voice and performance is evident through student work, not through student ratings. In order to publish student work in a course portfolio, you must have them consent to the representation of their work. You can have students fill out this document in order to grant that consent. Finally, instead of a generalized teaching statement, the reflections of the teacher are encompassed in an in-depth analysis of his or her teaching and future teaching goals (Bernstein 2006).

As members of an intellectual community, we’re happy when we can share our research. It’s valuable for colleagues to learn from our work and build on it, and we’re also proud to know we’ve accomplished something others find worthwhile. There may be a time when you feel that way about your teaching, as well, and KU has a way for you to share your accomplishments. CTE provides a number of faculty groups that share the products and insights of their teaching, and we work with faculty members to represent those in an online gallery. If you wish to share your work, we’ll help you create a course portfolio for our web site.

An overview of research into student surveys of teaching

Researchers into student surveys of teaching have come to widely varied conclusions about the validity of the surveys, the insights they provide, and the biases they do or do not contain. One of the few points researchers agree on is that student surveys should be only one measure of teaching effectiveness.

Student ratings provide an important but limited view of a course and fail to capture many of the evidence-based strategies that improve student learning (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2020). They generally do a good job of measuring student perceptions and satisfaction but “do not measure directly how much or how well a class of students has learned or any other aspect of achievement” (Abrami, d’Apollonia, and Rosenfield, 2007, p. 394). They also do not “match or measure the full range of academic functions nor ever-increasing obligations of faculty” (Wallace, Lewis, and Allen, 2019, p. 9). Nor do they reflect the innovative approaches that instructors have taken to improve student learning, especially during extraordinary circumstances like the Covid-19 pandemic.

KU’s own policies reflect the need for multiple sources of evidence about an instructor’s teaching. Even so, the use of multiple measures is widely ignored, leading to a loss of trust in the evaluation system (Austin, Sorcinelli and McDaniels, 2007). That became readily apparent early in the pandemic as faculty demanded that student survey results be excluded from personnel files, arguing that students would not account for the unusual circumstances brought on by the pandemic or understand the significant work involved in shifting to remote teaching. Those concerns underscore the need to follow university policy and broaden the approach used to evaluate teaching.  

The research literature also makes clear that student surveys of teaching should be grounded in a shared understanding of good teaching. They rarely are. Students, faculty and administrators often have differing views, and criteria vary widely across and within schools, departments and disciplines (Abrami, d’Apollonia, and Rosenfield, 2007). KU has no single definition at the university level, although questions on student surveys send a message about what should be valued.

This overview of literature highlights key areas of agreement, disagreement and concern about student surveys of teaching. It draws from a wide range of literature and is intended to provide an overview of the scholarly thinking about student surveys. It is far from comprehensive, and it is not intended to argue against the use of student surveys of teaching. The student voice is a crucial component in the evaluation of teaching. An earlier version of this literature review provided context and guidance for the Task Force on Student Surveys of Teaching in 2020-21, and is now intended to provide context to the changes that were made in KU’s standard survey starting in Spring 2021.

How to use evidence from KU's student survey of teaching

KU's current student survey of teaching was developed by a university task force in 2020-2021 and used for the first time in Spring 2021. The redesigned survey is intended to capture student perspectives on a course and its instructors, while reducing bias as much as possible. This document on Interpreting Results from the Student Survey of Teaching explains the structure of the new survey and offers suggestions for using data from it. The suggestions and examples can guide instructors in using the feedback to reflect on and improve their teaching and integrate student responses into a narrative about their teaching. The guidance can also help supervisors, evaluation committees and peer reviewers see how to use the student feedback as one source of evidence for gauging an instructor's teaching effectiveness.  

The results of the redesigned student survey of teaching can be integrated into the Benchmarks for Teaching Effectiveness Framework, which CTE developed to help instructors and institutions gather, interpret and use evidence of teaching effectiveness. The document above includes information about how the survey items align with the Benchmarks dimensions. Here are two additional evaluation tools that map the new survey items, along with other sources of information, onto the Benchmarks rubric dimensions:

• An Evidence Matrix, which lists the sources of information, including the specific groups of items from the current KU Student Survey of Teaching, about each dimension of the Benchmarks Rubric.
• An Evaluator Form, a fillable form for evaluators to use relevant sources of evidence to provide feedback about and score each of the Benchmarks dimensions