Teachers' Toolbox/Ways to improve your own teaching

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

Peer coaching

Resources

• Peer Coaching: An Innovation in Teaching
• Peer Coaching

Student evaluations

Feedback to the supervisor

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

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

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

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...