STEM Course Design Series: Feedback, Reflection, and Iteration

Justin: Hey everybody, welcome to Recombinant Teaching. This is the last episode of the Summer STEM Course Design Series. Can you believe it or not? I don't know. I can't. It's been going. It happened. It's gone fast. And we're wrapping it up with this episode today, where we're going to talk about reflecting on your teaching, getting feedback, and also iterating how to make it better in the future. And I'll be doing that myself as I finish up this podcast series, reflecting. And getting feedback and thinking about how I want to make it better if and when I want to do it again or do something similar. So, as with anything in life, reflection, feedback, iteration, all super important. I really hope you've enjoyed this series. We're in the 10th episode again. This is the last one. If you do have any feedback for me, let me know now. As always, send me a note, let me know what you think about it, and let me know just how it went, what you liked about it, what you didn't like about it, what you'd like to hear me talk about next time. But for today, let's get into it and talk about again feedback in general, but really thinking about that in terms of reflection and iteration. So when you're t when you teach a class, whether it's the first time, the tenth time, the 50th time, whatever it might be, you always want to think about how did it go? Why did it go that way? How did it how can I do it better next time? Because it's usually that's what you want to do, right? You want to improve, you want to make things better for you and mostly for your students because your students are paying a heck of a lot of money. To be there in your class. And well, you should do a good job for them. It's kind of your professional responsibility, in my opinion. And I hope that's in everyone's opinion that you need to do a good job. And well, do what you can to make it better for them. So you got to reflect on that. Why did it go the way it did? How can you make it better next time? And there's a lot of ways to get feedback. There's a lot of ways to get feedback to guide you with that reflection. And I'm gonna talk about three different buckets. So you can get feedback from your students. You can get feedback from others, your peers, and you can also get feedback from yourself. And there's pros and cons of each method, but I think using using a holistic approach, getting feedback from all of those three different buckets and sources is an important thing to do, and that will give you a really good insight into how did that course go? And again, how can you make it better the next time? All right, so let's talk about student feedback first. So, student student feedback, you might think, okay, end of course evaluations. The dreaded end of course evaluations, that's all there is, and they're terrible. Yes and no. Okay, so end-of-course evals, we know they're flawed. There's a lot of literature on this. I summarize it all in the book. And yeah, there's bias for sure. there's response bias, there's bias against the instructor, for the instructor, based on gender, ethnicity, age, appearance, attitude, enthusiasm levels. Yeah, it's all there. We we know this. So when you're trying to compare yourself to somebody else based on end of course evals, not ideal, right? Because again, they're you're two very different people and you should not be doing that. departments, if there's any department heads or administrators out there, you should not be comparing people with the end-of-course evaluations for promotion or tenure or raises and all those significant changes in your career. Not a good idea. However, I think it's a great idea to use end-of-course evals to compare yourself to yourself over time. All right. So think about the changes you might make from one fall to the next, from one fall to the spring. You can look at your own end of course evals and see what happens over time. I think that's an excellent way to use them. Let's say you use a new textbook or you add a new project or you or you remove something from a class. What happens to your evals? Of course the students are different every semester and and they might of course with different people have different experiences and there's some variability there. But if you make a big change to your course and you can look at your own evals over time, you'll get to figure out whether or not that was significant or not. All right. Not don't look at just the numerical ratings students give you, but look at the written comments. Those are even more important. Look at the written comments and see if anything changed. So yeah, I think inner course evals have their place when comparing yourself to yourself over time. I highly recommend you use them that way. But again. If you're gonna compare yourself to somebody else, you know, just that's you know, keeping up with the Joneses, that's not a great thing, period. But then again, if people are using those comparisons for promotion and tenure decisions or for raises, that's even worse. So don't do that. Okay, so but a bad thing about end-to-course evals is well, it's in the name. They're the end of course. So if you get all this feedback at the end of the course, who's gonna benefit from it? the students the next time you teach the class. Well that's not a bad thing though, right? Of course, because you're getting feedback on how to be better for the next time. But who's not benefiting? The students in the current course, right? You it's over. You can't make it any better. So don't wait until the end of the course to get feedback is my point. Okay. Do a mid-course evaluation. You know, if you're on a 15 week semester, do it in week seven. If you're do teaching a course for the first time, get feedback in week three. Week six and week nine, do it four times, right? You can do it as often as you want. Get feedback early and often, and then you can actually act on it, but at the minimum, do it in the middle. Do it in the mid-course survey. Okay. This is going to serve a couple purposes, right? You're gonna give students a chance to share with you how's the course going so far, and then you can actually act on it. And this is key. You have to act on it. So if you do a mid-course survey and you have students either do handwrite it during class on note cards or they turn they do it online, whatever way you want to do it, and you read it, but then nothing happens, you don't actually tell them about it. It's just like you're sending some random email to a company's support or customer service email inbox and you never hear back, right? You don't even know if anyone looked at it. It's dissatisfying. So if you do get mid-course feedback from your students, you have to respond to it. And this is really terrifying in some ways, at least for me. I've been doing this for 15 years and I still, every time I do it, I'm I dread opening that Excel sheet with all the feedback in it because I just I I just don't want to know. Like I don't want to know sometimes. But you have to, you have to know and you have to act on it. So you go through it. What I do is I I go through all the feedback. I make a one slide on PowerPoint and I share it the next day of class and I say, okay, here's everything you all liked about the class so far. Here's everything you don't like about the class. Here's what I'm gonna change and why I'm changing. Here's also what I'm not gonna change and why I'm not gonna change it. So I do all that. It takes about 10 minutes of class time, have a discussion with the students, but it's super important because it shows one that you care. It shows that you care about your students and how they're doing and the course itself. And then two, you actually still have now at least another month and a half or two months to change to make things better. Okay. And again, you can do it in week two, you can do week four, whenever you can do it as early and often as you want. And that will give even more time to change. So you you gotta act on it. So if you collect it, you gotta act on it. Don't let it just sit there in the ether and ignore it because that will not look good for you or for your students. So mid-course feedback, super duper helpful to do to improve the current class and how it's going. So consider doing that. another bucket of feedback is peers. So having your colleagues come and watch you teach. This can also be pretty terrifying, okay? We have a we have a problem, I think, in higher ed where we view teaching a kind of like a black box. You know, like this is my classroom, it's my little domain for these next fifty minutes. No one's allowed to watch me or observe or or see how things go on, right? It's my little domain. this is very different from K twelve, right? In K twelve you have administrators, principals always coming by to watch teachers teach and give them feedback. I know l some colleges do this pretty often and some department heads or administrators will come and watch their faculty teach all the time, but it's not the norm, I don't think. Not it not the institutions I've been at. So let's try to change that, everybody, right? Let's try to change that. Let's try to make our classrooms more open. Let's try to make our classrooms more welcoming and inviting for anyone to come by and just drop in. You know, change the culture of teaching, change the culture of observing teaching. So you can do that informally, right? Just have your your Colleague down the hall say, Hey, you want to come watch me teach today? I'm trying a new lesson, or you do it together. Say, hey, you come watch me teach, and I'm gonna go watch you teach. That's called peer observation, right? and these reciprocal peer observation programs. So those are great because you get to see each other teach and you get to learn a lot from each other. So when you go watch somebody else teach, yeah, you can give them feedback on how they did, but you almost always inevitably learn something new about how they're teaching. And that's what I love about. love going to watch other people teach again I can give you tips but I get to learn new things and that's you know selfishly there but that's a really cool thing to do I love seeing other people teach because everyone does it a little bit different right as we talked about in the in-class episode it's all about your personality and your own niche and what you're comfortable with. So you get to see other people do it like I would never do it that way but that was so cool. So watching other people teach super helpful and again doing on that peer level with another professor great kind of low stakes low pressure way to do this. some universities, including my own, now have a peer observation program. And I'll put a link in this in the notes for how we do it at Mines, where you get to it's formally assigned, you get partnered up with somebody else on campus, there's a form we use, there's a process, there's a reflection piece. It's really helpful because not everyone's into this, right? It's not everyone's jam to watch someone else teach. So by by kind of, you know, in a way making it part of the culture again, from different levels, you can have people, everyone. get more involved with teaching and learning, watching each other teach. And again, hopefully it'll change that black box kind of culture. So that's one way to do it with peers. You can also do it kind of more of a top-down approach where you have an administrator, you have a department head, you have a a dean, you know, if they have time, right? To come and watch your faculty teach. It's it feels a little more pressure driven this way though, because now it's like your boss coming to watch you perform and you got to do a great job. But there can be some pros for that too, right? Because they're, you know, it could be up for like a teaching award, they're coming to watch you observe you, things like that. but again, it could be a little bit more stressful. There's also a kind of a near peer model where you can have people in your teaching and learning center come and watch you teach. So these are folks that are experts in teaching and learning. They may or may not be in your discipline or in your general subject area, but they can give you a lot of feedback and they're there to help you. They're there to give you formative feedback and help, And so it's not that authoritarian authoritarian type of feeling you might get, right? But it's still a different type of person coming to watch. So yeah, there's there's benefits to having all the all these different types of people having you watch, right? So watch you teach. So definitely think about how you can do that and get peer observation. Because again, have people come watch you teach, you're gonna get a lot of feedback on yourself, but you can also go watch someone else teach. And you'll learn a lot too. Now, if you can't have anyone coming by or you don't want to, maybe you're a little scared, you can also just set up a camera, have someone film you in the back of the room, set up your own iPhone, something like that. And to me, that's the worst of all these scenarios. Watching myself teach on video is absolutely horrifying. I've had it done it several times in my career, and every time I feel like throwing up in my mouth. I hate hearing myself on this podcast. When I'm prepping this to release it, I listen to it and I hate every second of that. It's even worse watching me on video. but you learn so much. You learn absolutely so much from watching yourself teach on video. You get to see how you how you walk around, your mannerisms, your your posture, your voice, how you present things. It's incredibly impactful. So if you want to do that in addition to having a colleague come or instead of, it's a nice first step to get some feedback to yourself and you can reflect on how you're doing as an instructor. So get feedback that way too. And then that back this kind of is a nice transition to the last topic or bucket, which is self-reflection, right? So how do you know how a course is going? Well, you're the one that's taught it every single day, so you can really give yourself good feedback. So keep a teaching diary or keep a teaching journal. Okay. and this is not doesn't have to be anything fluffy and and locked under your bed like you might have had as a kid. It's it's it's a very simple thing you can do just on a notepad or on your on your word on your computer. So after a class is over. I take five minutes, hopefully pretty soon after if you are if you're able to, and just jot down a few bullet points. What went well, what kind of sucked, and what are you gonna do better next time, you know, or how what the mood was in the classroom, was the attendance high or low? Were there any certain clicker questions or activities that seemed to really bomb? Just make some notes about it. Were you were you really really rushed for time? Did you finish early for some reason, right? So just make all these comments. Doesn't have to be complete sentences, can just be fragmented comments. But the point is you're you're kind of keeping track in the moment what happened. This is really important to do the first time you teach a class, even the second or third time, because it's still early on in the process. Umce you've been doing it 10, 15 times, maybe you don't do it as often. But if you're making big changes, then for sure you want to bring that back and do this kind of model. are you gonna look at this right away? Probably not. But the next time you teach the class might not be for a whole nother year, right? If you teach the class every fall. So the next fall, as you're prepping, go back to this diary or journal. Now you have all these notes. Like, I totally forgot in lesson six that this activity took twice as long as I thought, and then I couldn't finish the lecture, right? So you have these notes now that you can use to guide your revisions for the next time we teach the class. So keeping this self-reflective journal diary, it doesn't have to be anything about your, you know. You can be about your feelings and whatever you want to write about. But again, for me, it's more about the practicalities. How did things go? again, how are the students doing? Any did anything bomb? Also, did anything go well? You can make the those positive comments too. But if you have that, if you have this self-reflection teaching journal or diary, plus you've had somebody come watch you teach, plus you have your student mid-course feedback, and a course feedback, you have a really nice holistic view of how a course went. You're gonna have really good feedback that you can then reflect on to improve the next time you teach the class. And that's the last thing I want to talk about today is iteration and improvement. So now you've done a class, whether it's the first time, second time, tenth time, you have all this data. You also have student performance data, right? We didn't talk about that. You have how the students actually do, right? How did they learn? What were their projects like? What were their exam scores and quiz scores like? You have all that data too. So you have all this to put together and you want to make the class better moving forward. So think about it. What do you need to change and why do you need to change? And you might want to do this in terms of priorities too. So if you got a lot of feedback from your students saying that, hey, your Canvas site, your LMS was totally disorganized, I couldn't find any assignment, it was really confusing, and you know, half your students said that. Well, that's a big priority to change. Okay. You want to spend some time upping your game on your course design on your LMS. Definitely do that. But now let's say you have 100 students and only one student said something that you need to change. And only one. Doesn't mean you should ignore it, but if it's only one out of a hundred, maybe it's not that important, right? Maybe they were talking about that you talk too fast in class, but no one else mentioned that. Well, maybe that was a one-off thing, and you don't really need to think about your your pacing during class, right? So the point is there's quantity there. So if you get a lot of students commenting on something, it's probably real and you want to act on it. If it's just one out of a hundred or more, again, read it. Take it seriously. Your student took time to write you that. You want to take care of that and think about it carefully, but maybe it's not as critical because not as many people said it. same thing for yourself and your own feedback when you're in your teaching journal. If you found over and over and over again, I ran late, I had to rush, I didn't finish on time. Okay, you gotta work on that. Go back to your lessons, start cutting stuff out. If anything's in there that shouldn't be in there, if it's not aligned to your learning objectives we saw as we talked about in an earlier episode, just cut it out. Or, hey, this activity, maybe this had, you know, it's a three-page worksheet. You know, maybe only it's gonna be one page, right? So just start thinking about how can you tighten things up. And that is something that will get better over time, I promise you. Timing is something that is really hard to master, as we talked about earlier in the episodes. But the more you do it, the better you get at timing and managing time in class and finishing on time without rushing and without having to jump save stuff for the next lesson. So that is something that everyone always continually works on, myself included, and you will get better with practice over time, I promise. so yeah, so think about all these data sets you have again, student feedback, instructor with its peer feedback, your own feedback, student performance data, and again, prioritize how what are you gonna change? Why are gonna change it? How are you gonna change it? Are you gonna change it at all? Maybe you won't, right? There's to me, it usually takes three times teaching a class to really feel good about it. There's time one, two, and three, it's everything's up in the air. Anything can change for me. But once I've done it three full times, I kind of get to a sweet spot, start to settle in, gets a little bit easier, a little bit less time involved every time you teach it, which then will is good because it will free up more time too. Maybe add elements to other classes or design new classes or do more research or do other service, whatever else you're doing in your own life. but things do get better over time because those new preps, the first time you teach a class, as we all know, that is a lot of work. That is a lot of work. But you gotta you gotta iterate, you gotta improve. always a problem with teaching for me as someone been doing this for fifteen years is burnout. It's true for all of us, it really happens. I taught human anatomy 13 times in four years at UC Irvine. I I teach classes all the time, you know, at least yearly, if not more often, sometimes in the summer too. And yeah, it gets it it gets boring, honestly. It gets repetitive. So you you want to iterate, you wanna change. So sometimes these changes you're making in iteration is for the benefit of your students, obviously, but sometimes it's for your own benefit because you know, hey, I'm just tired. of doing this same old lesson. I wanna I wanna change it up. I did that this last year in anatomy and physiology. I had some lessons that I've been s kind of stagnant for a year or two, or a couple of years honestly. And I say, hey, I'm gonna add a new topic for something that's in the news. I'm gonna spice it up, switch it up. And and yeah, I did that. And it was a lot it really helped me and it helped the students too because it tied into a current event. So beware of that. Beware of the burnout effect. Beware of being tired of of the same old material and again iteration all always, always, always is for improving the course for your students, but it's for yourself too. You gotta take care of yourself as an instructor, or you will get tired of it. You might get sick of it, you might get more cynical and frustrated, and you want to make sure you try to make it better for your own enjoyment and well-being. Because again, you know, we're all professors, we're all faculty, we're all instructors, hopefully because we love it, because we love being in the classroom. We love teaching. We love what we do. But You do it too much of something or the same thing over and over, you do get bored and tired with it. So you want to make sure to try to avoid that and iterate and make things better for yourself too, in addition to your students. All right. So that's it for this series. So I am done speaking. So we did about 200 plus minutes here over 10 episodes on the STEM course design series. I hope you learned something from it. I learned a lot sharing this with you and preparing for it. Again, a lot of this information is in my book. If you want to check out the show notes for a lot more details there on the book, as well as my card deck, especially the alignment card deck, which matches up with a lot of what we talked about here today, helps you design courses. But also don't forget about practice that card deck for the student success aspect of teaching and learning too. There's a lot of fun stuff in there for them. A lot more resources on my website too, a lot of free stuff you can check out there. And if you're interested in bringing me out to your own campus, if you want to hear me ramble on even longer in front of you and your faculty, please do reach out to me at any time and connect with me on LinkedIn or send me an email. And I'd love to talk to you about how I can work with you, your faculty, your trainees to talk about STEM teaching and STEM course design and how to improve STEM education together. So it's been really fun recording this for you all. I hope you enjoyed listening to it again. Please let me know what you thought about it. Please share it with your colleagues. Please let me know how I could do it better if I do this again in another series. We're going to return to the QA format of the Recombinant Teaching Podcast starting this fall. So if you want to submit a question that you want to be part of the show, please do that. Send me send the click the sh link in the show notes or send me an email or a DM on LinkedIn and I will definitely get you on the show either as reading your question or being a live guest, whatever you prefer. So love to have you and interact interact with you that way. So good luck with everyone l listening to this in your own courses, whether you're listening to this to get ready for a new class or in the middle of the semester or at the end of the semester, whatever time of the year it is, best of luck with your teaching, best of luck with your course design, and I wish you the absolute best. Happy teaching everybody. Take care.