All teachers, but especially those at the start of their career, should be observed regularly and given feedback on their teaching. One way to spread the burden and contextualise student comments is to engage in a regular programme of teaching observation. Rather, we should acknowledge students’ feedback while also refusing to place the burden of evaluation solely on the student. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take student feedback seriously. Students cannot function as objective evaluators their feelings about your teaching are affected by a variety of strong factors which are unlikely to be under their control. As Pekrun et al (2010) found, students experience a rich range of emotions at university, many of them related to their performance. Not to mention that university is an emotional time. In this state, it’s easy to mistake difficulty for boredom, intellectual discomfort for bad teaching. This isn’t because students are inherently less thoughtful than academics it’s because they’re in the process of learning, often learning concepts that will change the way they think forever. However brutal colleagues in your field might be in challenging your work, it’s unlikely that they’ll put their hands up after a conference paper and say “This was really boring” or “I didn’t really think this was necessary for me so I haven’t listened”. Student feedback can also be pretty thoughtless. You want so much to help, to educate, to engage – and despite the hours of hard work, you’re met with a wall. This makes poor feedback from students even more emotionally bruising. That’s why they often work long hours planning lectures, gathering resources and marking work. Most academics want to do well at their job, and despite certain parodied figures of the aloof professor, most people who teach in higher education want students to find their teaching useful and enjoyable. We’re supposed receive feedback like a gift, but it feels like a rebuke. But in this game, no-one will ever smile and give you a gold star. We all have a deep, interior need for approval. An anonymous ANU academic quoted by Inger Mewburn’s Thesis Whisperer blog captures the emotional ramifications of feedback brilliantly: However, it can be valuable, and I’d like to explore in this post some ways to make use of student feedback (even the negative stuff) as well as strategies that PhD students and indeed all academics can use to put that feedback into perspective.įeedback from any source can be hard to stomach. They report that I seem “inexperienced” and the block that I teach is “uninteresting”.’ This criticism means that ‘rather than being guided through the early stages of teaching, PhD students are being exposed early on to the bruising student-consumer market.’ I don’t want to devalue this person’s experience, or that of many others – feedback can feel bruising indeed. The writer reports that ‘our mandatory student feedback surveys are crushing confidence. The Guardian recently published an article by an anonymous academic entitled ‘Student surveys are destroying my confidence’.
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