9 Part E: Humanizing through Introductory Surveys and Mid-Term Feedback

Students reported that many of their professors do surveys at the start of their courses to “get to know their students.” However, students also reported that they didn’t know what was done with their information. With some forethought and creativity, however, there are ways to humanize student surveys and course feedback.

In practice, this can look like:

• Share anonymous student responses back with the class (as long as the class is large enough that students can’t determine who responded). Be sure to include a question on the survey such as “Do you give the professor permission to share your anonymous responses with the class?”
• Create a coffee/tea/water station and encouraging discussion before the lecture starts.
• Include a section in student surveys where can leave their email address if they would like a direct reply from the professor. One instructor who did this in a class of over 1,000 and had about 30 students leave their email address. The instructor felt more connected to the entire group after they sent short but custom replies to those students that referenced something that they shared in their survey answers.
• Distribute a pre-course survey to develop an understanding of where you students are coming from. Here is a pre-course survey example that you are welcome to use.
• Ask a series of “baseline” questions about what the students want to learn and why they selected your course. Additionally, you might then ask students to write reflections each week, culminating in a reflection on how they’ve grown and changed during the course.
• Baseline survey questions may include:
  • Why are you here? Why are you interested in this class?
  • Is there a specific thing you expect to learn, practice, or know at the end of this class?
  • How will you measure success? How will we know you’ve succeeded?
  • What are your learning goals? What do you want to learn? This can be knowledge or skills. It can be addressing a challenge or problem. It can be gaining experience in a project, etc. How do you propose to do this?
  • What support do you need? The supports could be support from peers, experts, resources, etc.
  • What evidence will you provide that you have achieved your goals.
  • How will you tackle mistakes and failures and how will you value those experiences?
  • How is online learning different?
  • What are 5 things that are better?
  • What are 5 things that are worse?
  • What is one thing about you that I should know that I can’t tell by seeing you online?
  • If you are comfortable, please share a photo so I can learn your name faster.
• Ask students to create a weekly Reflection Book to track how they’re learning.
• A Reflection Book may include questions such as:
  • Each week that we have class please reflect on the following questions:
  • What stood out for you today in class, what stuck?
  • What questions remain?
  • What are 3 ‘exam’ questions you would create from the materials and the class?
  • How can I improve your learning in the class?
  • How can you improve your learning in the class?
  • What is new vocabulary from this weeks’ experiences, readings, discussions?
• Mak the last question on a quiz into an open space to ask questions, share how students are feeling, or touch base with the professor. This can be a useful way to help students reach out to you and to you to get an idea of how your class is feeling without asking for a show of hands.
• Use digital tools, such as Menti (anonymized word cloud) for regular check-ins.
• Provide a mid-course survey. Here are some suggested prompts, which range from light and breezy to more serious (students prefer this):
  • Keep Stop Start: What is one thing, as your professor, you want me to keep doing / stop doing / start doing?
  • Keep Stop Start: What is one thing, as a whole class, you want us to keep doing / stop doing / start doing?
  • Aha Moments & Muddiest Points: What is an aha moment you had so far in term, and what was your muddiest point?
  • Is there something I can do, as your instructor, to support you throughout the rest of the course?
• Don’t ask questions if you are not ready to do something with the answer when you receive it. You do not want to traumatize your students with your survey asks. Here is a resource by Alex Shevrin Venet. It is a K-12 framed resource but works for HigherEd too.