500 Tips for Tutors by Race Philip. Brown Sally

Author:Race, Philip.,Brown, Sally
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

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Getting feedback from your students

Feedback is a vital process in any kind of learning. Not least, we need feedback to develop positive feelings about what we do as tutors (and of course to find out about things we may not yet be doing well enough). The following are just some ways you can gather feedback from your students – and thereby help to adjust what you do to help them to learn more successfully.

1 Watch their faces. There's a wealth of information to be gained from the body language of students in large groups, in small groups and individually. Facial expressions will often tell you things that they would not put into words.

2 Watch their backs! You may not be able to do this yourself, but a colleague can help you here. In a large group it's useful to have someone ‘watching from behind’ now and then. You may be able to learn of things going on that you had no idea about.

3 Open up dialogue possibilities. ‘Are there any parts you'd like me to say a bit more about?’ is a useful question. It's better than ‘Are there parts you don't understand?’ or ‘Any questions?’ Seeking out which parts ‘didn't get across first time’ leads to useful feedback in its own right. Sometimes it's easier to get such feedback in one-to-one chats or in tutorials than in a large group.

4 Now and then, give out a short questionnaire. For example, provide your students with some alternative ‘feelings words’ to ring or underline. Possibilities include ‘bored’, ‘interested’, ‘enthused’, ‘puzzled’, ‘stimulated’, ‘irritated’, ‘tired’, ‘swamped’, ‘intimidated’, ‘lulled to sleep’, ‘condescended to’, and so on. Don't take offence at the negative words they may choose; regard all feedback as potentially useful information.

5 Find out what they think about how their learning is going. When your students have covered several topics, give them a list of what they've done, with three columns for them to tick regarding how well they believe they have got their heads round each topic. Column headings such as ‘no problems with this’, ‘just about fine with this’ and ‘not yet able to do this’ can be useful. This sort of feedback gives you useful information about what got across and what didn't.

6 Help them to revisit the intended learning outcomes. This is another way of finding out how they think they're getting on. Give them a list of the learning outcomes (if necessary translated into student-friendly language). Provide three columns for them to choose from, such as ‘I've completely achieved this’, ‘I've partly achieved this’, ‘I'm nowhere near achieving this yet’, and ask them to rate how they feel about each outcome at this particular stage in their learning.

7 Occasionally give out open-ended free-response questionnaires. For example, ask students (anonymously) to write down answers to ‘the two things I most like about the programme are … and the two things I like least about the programme are … ’. It's possible to get some quite hurtful replies to the latter – but all feedback is useful if you accept it in the right spirit.

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