Obtaining relevant feedback is the key to improve irrespective of the field. It’s true for artificially intelligent systems, it’s true for organizations, and it’s true for individuals. And reflecting on such feedback can prove to be extremely helpful when someone is in training. I’m in one such scenario. I’m training to be a qualified teacher.
Having received no formal training in how to teach, I basically relied on the classic trial and error method to tailor-make every class to fit the needs of my students. Now that we were at the end of the academic year, it was time to look back and see how I’d done.
Upon considering the preferences of the students in their late-teens and my own requirements, I figured that the form should be
- short
- accessible on mobile phones
- able to save data digitally
- easy to share summary results
- available for long-term
- (not mandatorily) sharable
So, after going through a bunch of teacher assessment forms, I quickly realized that I was going to have to pick and choose from all of them. And I did using Google forms.
Since this was going to be a regular thing, I have made a generic one which I can use as a starter kit to add more course-specific questions as and when necessary. But the content as is, is already quite informative. The form is divided into 3 parts:
Part 1. About the teacher
1.a - Skills and responsiveness
1.b - Classroom atmosphere
1.c - Availability of the teacher
Part 2. Start, stop, continue
2.a - What should I START doing in the classroom/outside to help you learn?
2.b - What should I STOP doing in the classroom/outside to help you learn?
2.c - What should I CONTINUE doing in the classroom/outside to help you learn?
Part 3. About the course
I am really curious to see the responses for a question under part 3. “What is the one thing you want the other students to do to improve the course?” I expect answers such as better discussion, more peer feedback, more responsible involvement in projects, and the likes. Let’s see.
Feel free to use this form for your own courses too. But you’ll have to make your own copy of the form, though. Here is how it’s done –
- Click this link
- You should now be looking to the “Teacher feedback – starter kit”. No click on the three dots at the top-right corner
- Click on Make a copy - I cannot stress this enough
- Click on Make a copy
- Select where you want to save it on your own Google drive
- Click OK
Open and edit your form and when done, send the link from your copy of the form to your students.
That’s all folks! Hope this helps you become better at influencing the young, impressionable minds. Let me know if you can think of something that needs to be absolutely added to the form.
Creative Commons License
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Further reading
General points to consider – link – another link
Opening statement in the form, the 2 points – link
Start, stop, continue idea – link
Bonus: The other starter kit that I’d made was about creating a minimal project directory setup. You can read about it here – link