When I first started teaching 10 years ago, I came from the industry and had no previous teaching experience. My ratings reflected this: they were in the 80th percentile of all professors in the first semester I taught! In contrast, my latest rating—4.8 out of 5—for my Services Marketing MBA class, was one of the top ratings in our faculty. How did I achieve such excellent ratings when I started from such a low base?

Seeking Negative Feedback is Important!

Soliciting and responding to feedback, and being open to criticism were the most important factors in my development as an educator. In fact, academic research in management and organisation shows that an important trait of outstanding performers is their willingness to seek negative feedback with the objective of improving themselves. How can you obtain such feedback?

Why Should I Use Several Feedback Tools?

The standard university-wide student evaluation system is a good start. It provides a relatively hard and objective evaluation of your teaching. It shows your teaching standard compared to your peers. However, when you want to know exactly how and what to improve, you suddenly realise that the open-ended feedback provided by students in the university system is mostly ‘top of the mind’ or very general such as “he is very friendly” or “the course was very interesting.” Such feedback is excellent for learning about how students perceive your course or your style, but gives little specific and actionable feedback to questions such as:

• “Which cases did students really like?”
  
• “Was this project seen as value-added?” and
  
• “What exactly should I do differently the next term?”

Answers to such detailed questions provide insights on what to maintain, improve or change in your module and teaching.

How to Obtain Detailed and Actionable Student Feedback?

To obtain detailed student feedback, one should ask specific questions on the module design and teaching style, and offer an anonymous avenue for students to give that feedback. I have been using two main means of obtaining such feedback: (1) Module feedback collected in the last lecture of a module, and (2) Topic or session-specific feedback collected at the end of a particular class.

Module Feedback. In the last session of every term, I ask students to give anonymous and candid written feedback, which is then submitted at the end of the class. A sample slide I show students for this feedback exercise is provided in Exhibit 1. The feedback obtained is usually extremely detailed and actionable as I ask specific questions on my course and on issues for which I seek feedback. For example, if I had introduced a new type of assignment, I would specifically include this in the list of items for feedback.

I go through the following process in this feedback exercise: First, I position the feedback as developmental (i.e. I listen to my students and seek their views on how to improve), and I explain why I solicit feedback in addition to the university-organised student evaluation exercise (i.e. I need more detailed and specific feedback to truly know how to develop this module further). Next, I specifically ask the students to keep the feedback anonymous; otherwise I could neither take positive nor negative feedback at face value. Then I ask them to write down the three points they liked best and least about this course. Answers to these questions show me clearly what the strengths of the module are, and the key weaknesses that I should address. Next, I talk the students through various specific aspects of the module I would like to receive feedback on. These items change each time depending on what I did differently in a particular year (e.g. a new type of project).

Exhibit 1— Sample Slide for End-of-Module Student Feedback Exercise

Topic/or Session-specific Feedback. I also regularly collect topic or session-specific feedback to better understand what the value-added parts in a particular lecture are, or which aspects are less valuable to students. This is typically conducted informally perhaps for three to five sessions per term, and I only ask five to eight students in a particular lecture for this feedback. The feedback usually comprises the three best liked and least liked aspects of that session, and how the students liked the readings, cases, exercises and specific topics for a particular class. It is mainly a tool to guide my work on specific topics or lectures, and to sensitise me to student perceptions and concerns related to that lecture. Examples of such feedback I received in the past is that certain topics have already been covered in other modules (which means I can spend less time on such topics), or I assume knowledge that actually is not there (which means I either have to go through this material or ask students to read up on it before they come to class).

Are There Other Important Feedback Tools?

I personally find the two tools described in this article highly effective. They have given me immediate, actionable items that can be used at any time and frequency, and are cost effective and non-threatening. Having said this, there are other potential feedback collection tools, such as peer-reviews, or hiring a communications consultant to come and sit through one of your lectures and give you professional feedback. Other tools I find useful are benchmarking of course structure, contents, etc. against similar courses at the top universities in my field, or engaging in special interest groups in my field (there are special groups organised by academics in many fields with websites, email services, etc). Such feedback and benchmarking tools can be used periodically and offer excellent complementary feedback that might give you insights from a non-student perspective and avoid blind spots in your quest for improvement.

Conclusions

Seeking feedback is an important and an integral part of guiding your improvement efforts, working on your teaching style, and designing a module or a lecture. We need to know how good we are, and where we are on our road towards teaching excellence. While the current university-administered student feedback system does a good job in answering those questions, we need more qualitative and in-depth feedback to truly know (1) the strengths of our teaching and courses, and (2) the weaknesses that need to be addressed either via redesign, change of teaching style or simply managing student expectations. I have described two simple tools you can use for obtaining student feedback for the entire module, or even for a specific session or lecture.