What Students Say Is Good Teaching

Colleagues, as many of us are preparing and/or in the first week of our terms, I thought although this is not a typical SoTL article, I believe the material is timely. Insidehighered published an article entitled "What Students Say is Good Teaching" this week. The article also a rather lengthy recent report on "The Future of Undergraduate Education," of which their first recommendation is that "we should work to improve undergraduate instruction."

In many of the prior posts, I have shared research on how we can address this continuous improvement. In this post, the authors asked five undergraduate students to describe instructional practices that they believe have been effective for them. In short, their responses included:

1. Since the topic is new to them, "explain all the details." This approach encourages faculty to remember what it was like before they were experts in the field and that novice learners need a road map and clear scaffolding of the conceptual framework.

2 . "Email the professor with a connection that we had made between something that we had discussed in class and something outside of it -- anything that made us stop and remember what we had learned that week." This approach empowers students to reflect, and build beyond the material shared in class.

3. One student voiced their "realization in the value in engaging with criticism and improving the work on which it is given." Timely, formative feedback is key, especially when it is critical and can assist students to embracing a "failed event" to learn deeper, often these events build self-regulation strategies.

4. "When teachers make the students introduce themselves at the start of each class period in the first few weeks." Although this may be challenging in large classes, and could be modified, this point capitalizes on building a collaborative classroom culture and learning communities, both which can be helpful for students networking and peer assistance.

5. "I have found most students succeed when professors don’t intend to intimidate, reduce the reliance on grades as a measure of success, and identify student learning as the measure of their own success." I have nothing to add to this one : )