[The following is an announcement of a process we have set up. Please consider trying this. It takes only 20 minutes of your class time and can make a positive difference. Bill V.]
Most of us are constantly working at improving our teaching. We are varying classroom experiences, changing homework activities, selecting new textbooks, incorporating technology, or doing other things that we think will improve our classes. As reflective practitioners we think about it, try it, think about it, change it, and so on. The Instructional Advancement Center is announcing a student feedback process that can give you information that you can use to guide your reflection and improve your teaching practice.
The data collection process takes 20 minutes at the end of a period. A facilitator (an instructor at UM trained in this process) will come into your class and place the students into small groups. Each group will provide answers to three questions. The group must reach consensus on the answers. The facilitator will bring the groups together and collect the answers. Any answers that don't have full consensus from the entire class are eliminated. One student, or even a group of students cannot skew the results. The information comes from the entire class.
The questions are:
-- When this course is offered again, what should remain essentially the same because it works so well?
-- When this course is offered again, what should be altered or removed from the course?
-- When this course is offered again, what should be added that isn't part of the course currently?
In a private meeting the facilitator presents the typed results to the instructor. Hopefully the results will provide information that can be used to improve the class. In most cases there is at least one change (low hanging fruit) that can be put into practice at once. The students will recognize this as a result of their feedback, thus completing and validating the process for them.
This process was developed at the University of Washington and is called a Small Group Instructional Diagnosis, or SGID. It is widely used throughout higher education as one way to obtain information for personal growth and improvement of teaching. Since all instruction is designed to facilitate student learning, it is important to obtain the students' perceptions.
The optimum time to have an SGID done is midterm. That gives the students enough time to have experienced your course and gives you enough time to try to implement at least one of the suggestions in the feedback. For Fall 2005 SGIDs can be scheduled from October 17-November 11, 2005. Each instructor can request one SGID per semester. I hope you will use an SGID in one of your classes this semester.
To sign up for an SGID fill out the http://www.snurl.com/sgids on-line form. To get more information about the SGID process at UM, go to http://www.miami.edu/iac and look in the "Student Feedback Process - SGID" area. The complete protocol and policies are listed. To see how this is used at other institutions, go to http://del.icio.us/wvilberg/SGID for a number of links.
I view this as a win-win-win situation. The students win by being asked for their perceptions in a very specific form and seeing the results acted upon. The instructor wins by getting useful feedback to reflect on and perhaps put into practice. The institution wins by increasing (slightly) the amount of talk and thought about teaching. If you have any questions feel free to contact me.
And if you have previous experience with this process and would like to become one of the facilitators, please let me know. The goal is to have a group of instructors willing to provide this service to other instructors, reviewing and reflecting on the results together to advance instruction at the University of Miami.
Best day.
Bill Vilberg
Instructional Advancement Center
305-284-3949 (work); 786-218-3052 (cell); 305-255-9138 (home)
