Improving Teaching with Feedback & Evaluation

Gathering feedback on and evaluating your teaching can inform improvements to your course and create documentation that you can gather to use for career advancement. Learner-centered and evidence-based approaches engage instructors in the iterative cycle of asking questions or identifying concerns, trying new teaching interventions, measuring any change in student learning, reflecting, and doing it all again.

When teaching is carefully examined with multiple lenses (students, peers, self & scholarship), we can better assess teaching effectiveness and target areas for improvement.  These avenues of reflection and formative feedback offer opportunities improve your teaching over time, improve the student experience, and create a repository of evidence to use in summative reviews (e.g., tenure and promotion or contract renewal).

Offerings and Programs

• Pedagogical Partnership Program: Partner with a student for a semester to create innovative strategies for enhancing student engagement, reflecting on equity, and improving learning outcomes. 
• Mid-Term Feedback: Midway through the semester, invite CELT staff to gather feedback from students using a research-based protocol. 
• Teaching Squares: Join a collaborative non-evaluative process of reciprocal classroom observation and self-reflection 
• Individual Consultations: With a CELT colleague, discuss your teaching goals, assess and further develop your teaching skills and identify areas where you would like to improve your teaching skills. We are also happy to observe your class and offer feedback. 
• Tufts Springboard Funding: This intramural grant program sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR) offers Tier 3 funding of up to $15,000 to support a range of research, scholarly, and/or pedagogical activities.  
• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Partner with CELT to conduct a systematic inquiry research questions related to student learning that are shared publicly in peer-reviewed journals to advance the field of teaching and learning.

Online Resources

• Feedback from Students – Students’ feedback about their experience and learning can be collected with: surveys, informal conversations, performance on assignments and in class, end-of-the-semester exams, and through institutional student evaluations.  
• Feedback from Colleagues – Faculty peers and learning specialists (e.g., CELT and ETS colleagues) can provide invaluable insight into your teaching through conversations, review of materials, and observations.  
• Feedback from Self-Reflection – Self-reflection can range from informal (brief, end-of-day reflection) to formal (documentation for annual review, a teaching philosophy statement, or scholarly, data-based investigation into your teaching practices). 
• Feedback from Scholarship – Building on teaching practices embedded in an evidence-based culture of ongoing learning assessment, reflection and iterative change, we can publish research related to student learning in peer-reviewed journals.
  • Getting Started with SoTL 
  • Engage with the Institute for Research on Instruction and Learning (IRLI)