Teachers' Toolbox/Ways to improve your own teaching

There are several ways to continuously improve and develop your own teaching.

Peer coaching

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Resources

Feedback to other teachers

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Student evaluations

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Feedback to the supervisor

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Below is a sample of a questionaire for the students. But keep contact to the students during the project, also outside the lab/classroom to get a feeling for how the group is working and what they might need from you.

EXAMPLE: Feedback questionnaire

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We would like you to write a brief answer to the following questions, so we can improve the supervision and overall teaching of courses:

The theory and background:

  • Has the goal of the project been clear to you ?
  • Have you been in doubt about why you were doing something (if yes, please give an example) ?
  • Did you find the project matched and challenged your knowledge, or was it too easy/difficult ?
  • How did your supervisor teach you - did you miss some specific kind of help (more help on basic theory, more structured teaching etc.) ?
  • Whats the best experience you had during the project ?
  • Whats the worst experience you had during the project ?
    • if you had a bad experience, what would you suggest to avoid this in the future?

Groupwork:

  • Are you satisfied with your own engagement in the project ?
  • Are you satisfied with your groupmembers engagement ?
  • What kind of problems did you encounter in the team and why did they occur ?
  • Did you manage to distribute the workload evenly ?
  • Did you manage to follow your strategy plan ?
  • Could /should you supervisor help you more with how the group works, and how ?

Teaching portfolio

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Writing down in your CV or in a teaching portfolio what you have been working on and how you have approached the teaching with various methods depending on the aim and students level is a valuable source of inspiration when you get the 'grand picture' rather than solving day to day problems.

Video feedback

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Nobody seems to like this, but having you teaching recorded on video and the having a look at yourself afterwards is probably a very efficient way to see what you could improve...