Reviewing your learning & teaching practice
Reviewing and improving your teaching practice should be a continuous process: you
should regularly ask questions and seek feedback. The most useful feedback comes
from asking specific questions, not just: ‘Was that OK?’. You and your colleagues will
learn a lot from watching and discussing each other’s teaching. Your students, if you
explain why you are asking for their opinions, will respect your professionalism and
give you thoughtful and useful feedback.
It might be useful to bear these general points in mind:
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Review just a few aspects of your teaching at a time.
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Target your colleagues as well as your students.
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Only seek feedback on things you or other specific people can do something
about!
This resource will give you assistance in exploring your own learning and teaching
practice and will allow you to build evidence for your teaching portfolio. There are six
sections:
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Self Reflection: Ask questions about your teaching practice
Self Reflection: Feedback on recordings
Peer Support: Obtaining feedback from colleagues
Peer Support: Giving feedback to a colleague
Student Feedback: In class time
Student Feedback: Out of class time
Self Reflection: Ask questions about your teaching practice
You will find some useful questions that you can ask yourself about your teaching and
learning practice in the Reviewing Teaching (hyperlink and downloadable document)
document. They follow the sequence of a class. Don’t forget that there are many more
possible questions but these try to reflect good practice in teaching and they are
straightforward to ask, answer, and act on.
How should you use the Reviewing Teaching list?
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You might want to use this as a checklist to review your teaching. Some of them
you can act on before you teach the class – you can also treat them as a guide to
planning and running a class.
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Spend a few minutes after a class asking yourself some of these questions. Take
the questions, and your answers to them, seriously. Write the answers down.
Keep them. As you do this, you’ll steadily build up a rich and valuable account of
your work as a teacher, for your teaching portfolio ( hyperlink to something).
This evolving account of your teaching will clarify what is going well and will
help you to identify areas in which you want to improve.
( NB the Reviewing Teaching list below requires to be adapted to remove the
London bits etc- but I don’t have the document)
Self Reflection: Feedback from Recordings
A very effective way of constructing your own feedback is to record a class, whether a
large class with many students or a small seminar or tutorial. Audio is fine. Video gives
you much more information but it can be more complex to arrange and is more
intrusive. Tell your students why you are recording the class. You are not checking up
on them! The camera and/or the microphone will focus on you, not on the students.
Explain that no one else will hear or see the recording.
How do I use the recording?
 After the class, as you listen to or watch the recording, ask yourself some
questions about your teaching and about the students’ responses, maybe from
the Reviewing Teaching ( hyperlink) document. But note that the questions
you care about may not always be issues that you can do something about.
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You don’t have to ask your questions all at once. Focus on just a few each time.
Even hearing or watching five or ten minutes of the recording will be very useful.
Don’t worry if your voice sounds unfamiliar on the tape – everyone sounds
different from how they expect to sound.
Overall, ask yourself:
1.
2.
What is good about the way I run my class?
What one or two things might be better, and what shall I work on next?
Is there any follow up?
After a couple of weeks, record yourself again, and see how your teaching has
changed. Have you continued to do what you did well? Have you improved the
aspects you were bothered about?
Record and listen to yourself from time to time, a few times each year. Your notes on
what you hear and how you improve will be evidence for your teaching portfolio
(hyperlink).
Peer Support: Obtaining feedback from colleagues
There are four important steps to obtaining useful feedback from colleagues:
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Choose someone whom you respect and who respects you. Choosing your boss
might confuse things: it’s better to go for a peer.
Decide what you want feedback on. Don’t just say ‘Come in and tell me what you
think of my teaching’. You will already have some hopes, some concerns, some
fears, some assumptions, about what is good and less good in your teaching.
Here are some possible examples: but choose your own issues. You may decide
to use the Reviewing Teaching document as a guide.
Put the following in a box- or hyperlink
I want to know whether:
o the pace of my teaching is right
o I can be heard clearly at the back of the room
o my slides are clear
o the tasks I set students are clear
o I respond in appropriate ways to students’ questions
o the approach I used with student activities in the classroom worked
o students seem active and engaged or bored and confused.
Tell your students why this new person is in the class i.e. to observe you, not to
check up on them. Your observer should not participate in or contribute to the
class in any way.
As soon as possible after the class, sit down with the observer and ask them for
their feedback. First of all, simply listen to what they have to say. Check that you
have understood them correctly. Don’t start to justify what you did, or explain
why something happened the way it did. Just hear exactly what they are saying.
Then, when you have understood exactly what they are telling you, discuss with
them ways in which you might change your teaching in the future.
Don’t let them tell you what to do. You must decide what use to make of their
feedback.
Is there any follow up?
After the meeting write up notes, taking into account what your observer has said, as to
what worked well and what needs improvement for your teaching portfolio
(hyperlink).
Peer Support: Giving feedback to a colleague
Observing teaching and giving feedback is at least as useful as being observed and
receiving feedback yourself. Why not agree to observe your observer’s teaching?
There are several important ground rules for teaching observation: ( have as a sep doc?)
 Teaching observation must be confidential. As an observer you must not tell
anyone else what you saw or heard. This is vital. Without confidentiality and
trust, the process doesn’t work well.
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Answer the questions you have been asked to concentrate on. Don’t give lots of
unasked-for feedback and suggestions. You are there to help, not to judge, and
certainly not to impose your own teaching ideas. You may decide to use the
Reviewing Teaching document as a guide.
Answer in a kindly and constructive way. Speak to them as you would wish to be
spoken to.
Always say some positive things about their teaching.
First of all, tell them what you saw, what happened, without comment or
judgment.
Talk about what the students did, how the students reacted, as well as about
what the teacher did.
Distinguish clearly between:
 Facts, what actually happened – ‘The students were very active in the first
activity but they did much less work in the second.’
 Your opinions – ‘This may have been because the students weren’t as clear
about what to do in the second activity.’
 Your suggestions – ‘Maybe the second activity could have been shorter, with
fewer separate parts to it: perhaps two parts rather than four. Also, maybe you
could have put it up as a slide, so they could keep on referring to it.’
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Do concentrate on answering your colleague’s questions, and on helping them to
understand what happened and how they might run the class differently.
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Don’t jump in and tell them how you would have run the class.
Student feedback in class time
There are many ways to obtain feedback from students in class. The initial temptation
might be to ask them whether they like or enjoy the class. Of course it’s nice if students
say yes but remember that it’s vital that they learn from the class. So, instead of asking
if they like the class, you could ask them:
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What was the most important idea you got out of this class?
What are you still not clear about?
How to obtain student feedback:
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The best way to get honest opinions from the class is to ask them to hand in
their answers anonymously at the end of the class.
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Ask the students to write down one question that you should be asking them
about your teaching, and to hand this in at the end of the class. This will (a) tell
you what some of their issues are and (b) give you questions to ask in a short
questionnaire next week.
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Use a show of hands to ask a simple direct question: ‘Put your hand up if
you…would like me to speed up…were clear about that last slide…would like me
to suggest more reading on this topic.’ Students will soon learn to respond –
especially when you act on their responses. (So only ask questions that you can
do something about!)
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Note down the 10 or so things you think might be issues for your students, and
make a short questionnaire out of this: ( get doc as downloadeable)
Student feedback: out of class time
The ultimate ‘feedback’ comes from students’ examination results and what they have
written in their scripts. Some students may even be re-taking the subject – but even for
those taking it for the first time, it is useful to ask:
What do their successes and their errors tell me about
 what they have learned?
 where the teaching could have been better?’
How can you use the students’ examinations as feedback?
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If the Examiners’ reports in a subject say that a significant number of students
made a similar error, they may have picked that error up in class, whether
through commission or omission on the teacher’s part.
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Where this is an aspect of the course that you have decided is primarily up to the
students to cover, has their assessment covered this point?
After reading the Examiners report you should plan how you will reduce the chances of
your students making this error next year.
e.g. In an examination question on burglary, very few students seemed to know that the
word ‘building’ in the Theft Act 1968 has been interpreted by the courts as including
houseboat and a caravan, among other things. Of course you cannot know for sure that
this applies to students that you taught but it is still worth considering. Why would
students not know this? What had they not read that explains this? Could you change
the student task on the Theft Act next year to include one of the less common kinds of
‘building’, so as to raise this point?