CETL enhances the classroom
Each semester students and professors have the opportunity to enhance the classroom learning experience with the Group Instructional Feedback Technique offered by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.
Deborah Vess, a professor in the Department of History, Geography and Philosophy, is a GIFT facilitator.
“What we focus on is providing the faculty with some programs that will help them develop an area of their teaching,” Vess said. “Some of our efforts have really focused on trying to assess what the students are getting out of classes and how we can do things better in the classroom that will improve learning.”
To conduct the GIFT evaluation, a volunteer facilitator goes to the classroom to discuss the course with students without the presence of the instructor.
“We don’t take any suggestions from particular students,” Vess said. “We’re looking to see what kind of consensus there is.”
The consensus eliminates any extreme positions and prevents any one student’s comments from singled out by a professor.
The instructor takes that feedback and tells the students which of the suggestions they think they can implement,” Vess said. “If can’t implement all of them, then they tell them why they are going to continue doing things the way they are doing them.”
Jan Hoffman, co-chair of the Department of English, Speech & Journalism, conducts a two-hour workshop to train professors to be facilitators.
“The workshop teaches instructors how to facilitate the evaluation without asking leading questions,” Hoffman said. “It teaches them what questions to ask.”
Vess said CETL has 13 trained facilitators who conduct about 15 GIFT evaluations each semester.
Hoffman said she has been involved with hundreds of evaluations since she was a graduate student at the University of Washington.
“I’m a huge fan of this process,” Hoffman said. “It reinforces the classroom relationship with students and teachers, and that is-you’re in it together. Students have as much responsibility as the instructors to make the relationship work.”
Roger Noel, chair of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages, decided to be a facilitator after having a GIFT evaluation in his class last semester.
“I thought the information I received was quite useful, so I volunteered to be a facilitator to help other faculty who might want to get some insight in how they are doing in a particular course,” No?l said.
No?l said the benefit of GIFT is that it is a non-threatening type of evaluation, which allows students to voice their concerns.
“The students get the sense that the instructor actually cares about them, about teaching and about learning,” No?l said. “Students also get a sense that they have some ownership in the course.”
Hoffman said GIFT evaluations are not something that professors need to do every semester.
“Whenever you run a class for the first time, you are not sure how it is going to go,” Hoffman said. “It is a wonderful thing to be able to stop around the mid-point and ask students what is working well and what could be done to change it.”
Hoffman said a GIFT evaluation is better than the end of course evaluation because it allows students to affect change during the current semester.
“The typical way students provide instructors with feedback is end of course evaluations,” Hoffman said. “That’s great feedback for the instructor and may well help the next generation of students, but it doesn’t do you any good.”
Vess said GIFT evaluations not only improve the course, but also improve the relationship between professors and students.
“The students seem to like to hear what the other students are thinking about the class,” Vess said. “I think they really appreciate that the faculty member was interested in having one of these sessions and seeing what the students actually thought.”
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Feb 24 2006. Filed under News.
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