Resources

Recently, I finished a book called Midcourse Correction for the College Classroom: Putting Small Group Instructional Diagnosis to Work (Hurney et al. 2021). It’s about a program on college campuses in which faculty members invite a colleague to come to their class at the mid-semester point to find out how the course is going from the students’ perspectives. This is a program offered at my institution, and many others, usually through a professional development or teaching and learning center. The book, and such programs, got me thinking about soliciting feedback from students, beyond simply what most of us are required to do in the form of final course evaluations. Think about it: course evaluations, if we even read them (and so many of my friends don’t, because it’s such a stressful experience), only let us know how the course was, how we did, what a group of students that is no longer enrolled with us thought about our teaching and their learning. Notice the past tense. Certainly this information can be useful for future courses (I am—usually—the same person teaching Religions of the World this time as I will be next time, after all), but it doesn’t exactly help those particular students in that particular course. (And I won’t even dive into the controversy around the utility and validity of student course evaluations here; suffice it to say, those evaluations are one of the only times that we actually ask students, the primary recipients of our teaching efforts, what they think about those efforts.) The point of a program like the one profiled in the book is that we can ask for feedback from students before the end of the semester, before the experience is over, when there is actually time to make changes or reroute. The small group instructional diagnoses occur at the mid-semester point. (You can check out the book to learn more about the process; it’s pretty cool!) Typical questions asked of students are: “What has helped your learning in this course so far? What has hindered your learning in this course so far?” and “What suggestions do you have for improvement?” The focus is on learning, not what they like/dislike or the instructors’ performance. At JMU a few years back, we also added companion questions focused on the students’ own behaviors, for example, “What are YOU doing that has helped your learning in this course so far?” as a way of conveying that they are also, and I would argue, ultimately, responsible for their own learning.) Then, with this information, instructors can decide what, if any, changes or clarifications they’d like to make during a follow-up conversation with the students and for the rest of the semester. In the absence of such a program, or colleague support, you can always ask these questions yourself (e.g., through anonymous paper forms in class, an anonymous ungraded survey on your LMS, etc.). But there are lots of other ways to check in with students and get actionable, important feedback. You might have students fill out a weekly online “how’s my driving?” Google form, as one of my friends does, or you might lead an in-class discussion every so often about how everyone is doing, or you might ask students to fill out a word cloud of how they’re feeling at the beginning of class on a particular day. There are lots of things we can ask about: students’ moods, feelings, and stress level; whether they understood a particular concept, lesson, or reading; how that recent test or lecture went; what study strategies seem to be working well for them; and so on. I use a variety of ways to check in with my own students and get their feedback in all of my courses. Last semester, for example, I had experimented with a great deal of flexibility around the exams (e.g., they were take-home and not timed), to try to ease the anxiety and overwhelm that I knew students were experiencing, and I wanted to know how this approach was working for them. I spent time in class after the midterm on a debrief. It turned out that many students were taking hours to complete their work, even though I had intended the whole thing to be over in 75 minutes. This was stressing them out more—the opposite of the effect I was trying to achieve! I took their feedback, which I would have never realized if I hadn’t simply asked, and made some changes to the final exam (e.g., reduced the number of questions). Students noted in my course evaluations (as they do every semester) that they appreciated how I asked them for feedback and how I adjusted parts of the course as a result. Indeed, research on mid-semester feedback programs demonstrates that students appreciate being asked. And, of course, this kind of feedback process can benefit us too, as we open up lines of communication with students, convey care, and possibly learn which adjustments to the course will better facilitate their learning. After all, who wants to be teaching a course that’s not going well? Who wants to dread going to class every day? Who wants to be giving failing grades on projects? Who wants to be meeting resistance, but not knowing why? It often doesn’t occur to us to just ask students when we want to know more. But we can. What do you want to ask?

“Spiritual Companioning for Ministry” is a course I recently taught for the first time for a colleague when she took a well-deserved sabbatical. She shared her syllabus and course plan with me and told me that she usually taught it to about 12 students which worked well for the topic. A couple of weeks ahead of the semester, I realized that I was going to have to make some major changes fast; close to 40 students had registered. The class involves a lot of sharing, often around intense topics, in order to become skilled in responding to the issues that surface when companioning others on their spiritual journey. I needed to design a way for so many students to have the ability to engage the texts as well as form a confidential and trusting learning community for the many discussions of this course. The key was to build effective small groups, which we called learning teams. Because Catholic Theological Union has students from around the world we used part of the first class to divide students into learning teams that allowed for diverse voices in each group. During that first class, we also discussed small group dynamics and the learning teams were invited to develop “ground rules” or covenants they wanted to keep with one another. (Examples of covenant points include confidentiality, cell phone use, planned facilitators etc.) The learning teams soon became the cornerstone of the class. They provided a rich framework for practical experience and integration of course material. Community within each learning team was fostered in a number of ways: The classroom was rearranged so that each learning team had a table to sit around. Tables were spaced so that intimate conversations could take place and other groups were not too close. This physical arrangement set the tone for the atmosphere I was hoping to foster in the class. Each session included discussions within learning teams. Discussion prompts might have been for groups of two or three or discussions for six, but students were always in discussions with someone from their learning team. This allowed for a mix in the types of discussion but kept discussions within the learning teams to build relationships throughout the semester. Each class began with a reading assessment where learning teams would discuss the readings and work through an assignment of questions or activities about the readings. This encouraged each student to stay on top of the readings, as their small group would expect their participation in these weekly conversations. Students completed “noticing journals” on our online D2L course management system. They were asked to post brief responses to prompts such as “Discuss a time this week you talked with someone about prayer” or “Discuss a time this week you noticed someone talking about or discerning a decision.” These posts would be read and responded to by learning team members online. One of the gifts of the online discussions was that students who were more hesitant to participate in the larger class setting had an easier time participating in the online forum. Throughout the semester, the worksheets on the readings, the noticing prompts, and in class discussions were more involved. Students engaged one another on progressively deeper levels. I spent less time engaging them in a large group but floated around the room checking in on their discussions, answering questions, and making notes for the next class’ lecture based on what I was noticing in the teams. During the semester, several students experienced serious illness or a death of a beloved family member. The learning teams provided an intimate hands-on forum for spiritually companioning one another in a way that the larger classroom could not have handled. On the last day, I brought in “talking pieces” that represented various discussions from the semester and invited students to “end well.” Learning teams were encouraged to select a talking piece and give each person in their group a challenge, a commendation, and a blessing. The learning teams took their time with this session; some continued well beyond the allotted class time. The sharing was deeply emotional and confirmed that learning teams within a large class provided the framework that modeled and built companionship in a profound way.