We are halfway - or more - through the semester, and if you haven’t checked in with students lately, now might be a good time. I like to use this Midterm Course Feedback Form (you’ll be prompted to make a copy of the form for yourself) to ask for students’ thoughts on how the semester is going. I like to give students the link and about 10 minutes to complete the survey during class. When I do this, generally, I find that responses fall into one of three buckets:
Things that are going well.
Things that we could work on.
Things that we can’t change.
In the next class meeting, I take 5-10 minutes to discuss the results. With things that are going well, I congratulate them, noting that whatever is going well for them is largely due to their hard work and persistence. With the things to work on, students often share habits or behaviours they aren’t doing (getting enough sleep, doing homework consistently) or problems related to class pacing (not enough time to do course readings, not enough time to revise a paper, it would be better if assignments were due on X instead of Y) and only sometimes* with my preparation or delivery of content (not explaining or providing enough practice activities). This is where the meat of the discussion about what we all can do better happens. When it comes to things we cannot change - how long class meets, how many papers they write, whether we meet in person on campus or on Zoom, or neither - I address the concern, noting that I hear they are worried, and explain that I’m limited in how I can respond.
*I say only sometimes not because I don’t have room to improve, but because it’s not as frequent that students can articulate a pedagogy-related issue versus a pacing issue. Put another way, they blame themselves for not understanding more than they blame me for not explaining well enough.
For more discussion & resources, I first shared the idea of doing midterm course feedback surveys last fall.