Evaluation and Assessment | Teaching Practices |Teaching with Technology| Sample Course Evaluation Forms
Teaching Tools
2. Teaching Practices
2.4. Knowing Your Students
Assuring Quality and Cohesiveness
Teaching first-year undergraduates in first-year courses offers many challenges. Many first-year courses are large, multi-section endeavors where consistency across instructors and TAs can be difficult to manage. Experienced faculty offer their tips on maintaining high quality in courses for first-year undergraduates.
Administer an early course evaluation three or four weeks into your course in which you ask students to identify things that help them to learn in the course as well as things which hinder their learning, and ask for suggestions about ways to improve the course. Make sure you report to students the results of the evaluation and how you will act on the recommendations or why it is not possible to make particular changes. The Center for Teaching can provide sample evaluation forms.
Ask students to write down unanswered questions at the end of class. You can respond to these questions via e-mail to the class or during the next class.
Find 1-3 students in the course to act as ombudspersons or a quality circle who will give you regular feedback about how the course is going. The students should be selected by their classmates so everyone will rely on them as representatives. In a very brief weekly meeting, these students can carry back to you concerns or problems about the course reported to them by other students.
Monitor the quality of the sections in a large course. Some faculty find it useful to visit their TAs' classes themselves for short regular visits to see how the overall course is going and also to provide helpful feedback to the TAs. If you have a head TA for your course, classroom visits and feedback to less experienced TAs might be part of his/her responsibilities.
Have weekly meetings with TAs to inform them about what you are doing in lecture and to learn about how students are doing in recitations and on assignments. In addition, you can use this opportunity to advance the development of the TA as a teacher. For example, you can discuss possible responses to early course evaluations or use group discussion to help a TA decide how to handle a challenging situation in his/her section.
Be sure TAs receive student feedback on their work with students in recitation, labs, review sessions, and office hours. The Center for Teaching and many departments can provide you with early course evaluations designed specifically for TAs.
Strongly encourage TAs to seek feedback on their teaching from experienced peers through the Center for Teaching's Classroom Observation and Feedback Program. The feedback from these individual observations can be very useful in clarifying how to respond to feedback from early course evaluations.
Have your TAs take turns sitting in on lectures. For the relatively small amount of time invested, they can more easily build on the lecture in recitation, better address any areas of student confusion they see, and give you and the other TAs feedback on any areas of the lecture which students found difficult. Also, they can be available to respond to students' questions immediately after lecture.
Adapted from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University
