Getting feedback from students can help you:
- Check student understanding at an individual level.
- Reflect on your teaching in terms of how lesson content is conveyed and understood.
But it can also have practical and theoretical drawbacks:
• In terms of the former, for example, it can be time-consuming to create and interpret.
• In terms of the latter there are potential expectancy problems – students effectively tell you what they think you want to hear.
One way to avoid these problems is to develop a quick and simple way of gathering feedback – and this is where the five-minute feedback form comes into play. The form is given to students to complete at the end of a lesson and allows you to gather evaluation data in a way that focuses on identifying:
• content, rather than delivery: the focus is on identifying what students think they have learnt.
• teaching and learning mismatches: identifying any discrepancies between what the teacher sees as the most important lesson content and what the students believe they have learnt.
• student learning issues: consistent mismatches between what the teacher views as important content and individual student perceptions can be identified and remedied.
• teaching issues: if students in a class are consistently failing to identify important content the teacher can reflect on the teaching process in order to find ways to make it more effective.
Download Five-Minute Feedback Form pdf