In this extra post, Haolan Tu explores different methods for tutors to gather feedback from students about their teaching. Haolan is a Post-graduate Tutor at the Biomedical Teaching Organisation, and a Doctoral Student in Diabetes and Steroid Endocrinology.
Postgraduate student-led tutorial is a cornerstone of undergraduate curriculum in the Edinburgh Medical School, Biomedical Sciences and beyond. However, tutors are often not directly involved in the wider course design and evaluation, and are therefore excluded from the common feedback loops, such as end-of-course questionnaires. While we talk about “closing the feedback loop for students”, tutors also need timely feedback to reflect and improve their teaching practice.
Reflecting back on my Edinburgh Teaching Award (EdTA) journey towards the Associate Fellow of HEA, one of the challenges I encountered was asking for feedback from students.
The students responded well to the quizzes and were more engaged in the tutorial, as I wrote in my EdTA submission.
And how do you know they were more engaged? My mentor commented.
Hmm, I thought, from the good vibes?
Apparently, having ‘good vibes’ is not really enough for the submission. Often you need some forms of written evidence such as a written quote from students. Students usually provide feedback through mid-semester or end-of-course questionnaires. Any course organisers out there would tell you there is a lack of engagement with those questionnaires, and very few course organizers share them with the tutors. If you do get a sneak peek of those feedback, you would sometimes get one or two sentences such as “the tutorials are helpful”, or “the tutorials are useless” – which makes you wonder: is it my teaching?
Then it occurred to me. Since my students are all there at the tutorial, I can just ask them on the spot! I started asking my students for real-time feedback during the tutorial. I tried this is a few different ways…
Post-it notes: The first method I tried was post-it notes. I usually left a bunch of post-it notes on the table – with the pens (I once had a tutorial where we had to share two pens among 15 students!). At the end of tutorial, I would ask them to write any feedback they have on the post-it notes, which I left on their table. With this, I gained little informative feedback: most students would leave it empty while others just scribbled a short “it’s great”. There’s also problem of anonymity when there were only a few people in the room, so students might have been a bit inhibited in leaving honest feedback.
Slido: The next thing I switched to was an online platform called Slido – you could use Padlet, WooClap, or any platforms of equivalent that allows students to engage from their own personal devices [find out more about University-supported digital tools on the Learning Technology website]. I usually reassemble part of a tutorial into interactive activities, such as word cloud, votes, and multiple choice questions to keep them engaged with the platform. At the end, I would leave a few minutes for an extra question of “Do you have any feedback or general comments for the tutorial?”. With that, I was able to see the real-time feedback (e.g., they want more small-group discussion time rather than a Q&A format) and adapt their practice in the next group immediately after. However, I found this activity rather dependent on the format of the tutorial – students tend to respond better when the tutorial has more of an online interactive component, i.e., when they use Slido as a part of tutorial activities. There is a barrier in scanning the QR code and students often would not do it just for filling in the feedback.
Back to post-it notes, but better: At the end of the semester, I wanted to survey how students felt about providing feedback through Slido in comparison with the end-of-course questionnaire. To get everyone’s feedback, I converted back to using the old written way – this time with the questions written down and threats of “you’re not leaving the room until you fill this in”! From the 64 second-year Biomedical Sciences students I tutored, they fed-back on the following issues:
- Sometimes forgetting about end-of-course questionnaires.
- Struggling to recall tutorial details by semester’s end.
- Feeling unwilling to spend time outside class on feedback.
They found Slido convenient for leaving anonymous feedback, especially when immediately after tutorials while their memory was fresh. However, some students were also overwhelmed with different routes of feedback. I would use it [Slido], wrote one student, if the whole course is using it.
Can we integrate feedback for tutors in the feedback system?
Everyone thrives through feedback. Postgraduate tutors often have little or no experience in teaching in higher education and need feedback to refine their practice. At the same time, students are already bombarded with feedback forms, QR codes, questionnaires, etc. So, how do we gather quality feedback for all staff and postgraduate tutors, without overwhelming the students with different feedback routes across multiple platforms?
A potential and simple solution might start from integrating feedback for tutors within the existing course evaluation systems, for example, adding an extra question: “How do you find the tutorials?”
Haolan Tu
Haolan Tu is an Medical Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership student in Diabetes and Steroid Endocrinology, and Associate Fellow of HEA since 2024. She is a tutor at Biomedical Teaching Organisation, CMVM, and co-chair of the Curriculum Transformation Programme’s Student Engagement Strategy Group.
