Student View
The view of the appraiser is useful, especially when they have deep knowledge and spend time reflecting thoughtfully on the practice and pedagogy they see demonstrated in the classroom. But even the best appraisals happen intermittently. Students are there throughout the year, in every class (well, most of them, anyway). They see how I behave when we're by ourselves.
So I've made it a practice to ask my students for feedback. I regularly open discussions with them about the way the course is going, how I could improve, and what else they feel they'd like in my classes. At the end of the school year, I ask for a more formal appraisal from them, as a "What's MY grade?" survey. Here are my results and takeaways.
Numerical/Grade Results
I asked these questions with a 5-point rating scale for the answers (you may review the actual survey if you'd like). These averages come from students across all my courses.
My marks for this year stayed quite stable. Nearly all students felt I cared about them as a student and as a person. Almost everyone felt it was easy to get help from me.
There was a small overall rise in how many students felt I cared about them as a person (0.1), with small drops in "How easy is it to get help" and "How clearly do. I communicate" (0.2 and 0.3 respectively).
My overall mark (purple line) rose just a bit, from 3.3 to 3.4, with the standard deviation staying stable at 0.6, which I regarded as a win.
Narrative comments
I've included samples and summaries to record the general trends.
As a teacher, what have I done this year that you would want me to keep doing?
"...You alway took us through each and every step to suceed..."
"I appreciate that when I'm trying to understand a concept, you don't usually give me the *complete* answer, but enough for me to figure the rest out on my own."
"I liked that you mostly let us figure things out for ourselves unless we need help. I found that when I figured something out for myself it made it much easier to remember."
"...I liked how everyone could use nolat labs to work at their own pace..."
"The freedom has helped me get to see a glimpse of how to work these things without such commands."
"You have encouraged us to be thinkers and it helps a lot."
As a teacher, what would you suggest I could do better, or differently, next year?
Comments in this categeory this year were minimal. Two students said something similar: "It's just that sometimes you have to wait awhile to get your work checked, and I think that because sometimes you are very busy with other students and helping them learn, in which I don't mind."
From previous years, I've heard:
"Some people feel that the class is too open and they would work better with an assigned project so developing a set of projects to do for students who want a more defined structure for the class would help."
"...In order for students to think that DT is a fun class, I think you should assign us assignments rather than giving us the whole class an independent work..." (that one really surprised me)
Word cloud of phrases students picked to describe the class/experience; text size represents frequency of selection