This week, I’ll share two different instructors’ approaches, both of which center on student reflection. Asking students to make sense of their own learning is, of course, educationally beneficial. And, as these examples illustrate, it can also provide a more meaningful and optimistic ending to the semester for instructors, too.
On the last day of class, Rebekah Bennetch, a lecturer of professional communication at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Engineering, passes out index cards and asks students to write a “postcard of advice” for someone taking the course in the future. Bennetch gives students the option of signing their names. If they do, she’ll read their notes to the class anonymously. If not, she’ll read their reflections on her own after class.
“I like this kind of closure for the ending of a course — a kind of looking back, before moving forward,” Bennetch wrote in a recent Bluesky thread. It’s fun, reflective, and avoids ending the term with exam review.
Emily Pitts Donahoe, associate director of instructional support in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, has a different way of gathering student reflections: She has students complete a short survey at the end of her course, asking them for feedback on her grading approach and about how they used AI. This time, she explained in her newsletter, Donahoe added a question: “What’s one thing you learned in this class that surprised you?”
The answers were “especially gratifying,” wrote Donahoe, , who is also a lecturer of writing and rhetoric.
She shared some of them in her newsletter, including “writing doesn’t have to be boring,” “I don’t need to be scared to talk out loud,” and “be confident in my work.”
In the newsletter, Donahoe expresses some ambivalence about the semester and her own teaching. Getting this feedback from students gave her a lift, she writes, and she recommends finding a way to collect similar comments. “It might,” she writes, “provide the ray of sunshine we all need at the end of another tough semester.”
Did you gather students’ feedback and reflections at the end of the semester? If so, what did you do and how did it work? What did you learn? Or do you have a different way you plan to bring your semester to a close next time? Share your example with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and it may appear in a future issue of the newsletter.
Creating community online
In recent years, professors have experimented with all kinds of ways to build community in online courses. So, which approaches seem to be most effective, and where does online teaching go from here? I will dive into these questions with a group of expert panelists in a Chronicle webinar at 2 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, December 17. Register to attend here.
In the meantime, send me your questions at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and I may pose them during the panel.
ICYMI
- Expecting students to navigate professors’ various AI policies places too much of the burden of academic integrity on students’ shoulders, writes Daniel Cryer in an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed.
- Getting students to come to office hours is a perpetual challenge. Maggie Hicks reports in EdSurge on some professors’ creative approaches to bringing them in.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
—Beckie
As always, nonsubscribers who register for a free Chronicle account can read two articles a month. Your readership supports our journalism.
Learn more at our Teaching newsletter archive page.
