Building a reflective teaching practice
Reflective faculty dedicate time to evaluate their teaching practice. From the structure of the course to the classroom community — it is helpful to reflect on how your specific teaching decisions impact students’ learning. As you analyze your teaching, consider how you might approach particular tasks or challenges, or an activity that you didn’t find as successful, in the future.
As you consider whether or not it is time for a review, think about:
- Design of instruction: Have you clearly defined the learning goals you have for your course? Do the assessments in your course map to the goals you have for the course or program learning outcomes? Do the activities you facilitate (lectures, discussions, readings) create experiences for students to reach those goals?
- Course management: Did your schedule of readings, activities, and assignments work well? For instance, do all of your assignments fall at the same time, or are they evenly spaced out? How do you organize assignment deadlines and manage timely grading and/or feedback?
- Knowledge of subject matter: Is there new scholarship in your field that you would like to explore and perhaps address in future iterations of your course?
- Teacher–Student interactions: What are the different ways you interact with students? Are you “the sage on the stage,” a facilitator of learning, or something else? How do you make yourself available to students during outside of class during office hours and via email?
Feedback and Coaching
Faculty are not trained to be experts on pedagogy and people generally are not the best judge of their own skill level. We offer a variety of opportunities for you to receive feedback on your teaching so you can reflect on how to continue to improve your practice.
- Facilitated Feedback: A trained facilitator will meet with your students during the semester to gather feedback on their experiences and what changes might be helpful.
- Peer Observations: Partner with another faculty member to visit your course to use an observational protocol to receive feedback on your practice.
- Student Evaluations of Teaching: Let us help you understand the feedback you get from your learners after the semester and how it might be used to improve future courses.
Ready to Re-Design?
There are many reasons why you might which to re-design your course, including:
- You have found new learning materials or tools you would like to explore
- You feel like the learning content and activities you provided last time you taught the class didn’t quite yield the results you were hoping
- You would like to explore different strategies to engage students in participation, group work, discussions, etc.
- You would like to explore ways or tools to differentiate your instruction
- You may have collected too many resources in an online course, and feel like you need to trim down and re-assess what students need to be successful
- Your discipline has made advances, or there is newer/more current research that you would like to incorporate
- You would like to incorporate a specific teaching strategy into your course design
- You would like to get a head-start on making your inaccessible content more accessible
- Maybe you just feel like it is time to change and/or innovate!
For these, or any reason, reach out to the Instructional Designers at CTL to make a plan. Click here to book an appointment.
What is great college teaching?
This short video outlines some measures of great college teaching, informed by Ken Bain’s “What the Best College Teachers Do” (find this in the CTL lending Library).