Your teaching has probably come to the end for this year, and you might be feeling a mix of sadness at not seeing your students on a weekly basis, and relief that you can spend the summer making some more progress with the thesis. But while your experience this term or year is still relatively fresh in your mind, it’s useful to take a step back and think about how things went, and make a few notes for yourself to refer back to in September or the next time you teach (I find Google Keep is quite useful for this as it’s easily accessible on my phone and I can search for the relevant note when I need it later on).
Here are ten questions to ask yourself to enable reflection on your teaching this year:
- What was my favourite part of teaching this year? What can I do to replicate this in future?
- What was the most challenging part of teaching? Would I do anything differently if this happens again?
- How do I know that my students are learning?
- What do I do when students aren’t learning in my classroom? Is this effective?
- Are the relationships that I have with my students helping or hindering their ability to learn? Is there anything I might change about these in the future?
- How am I encouraging my students’ curiosity?
- What kinds of activities do I often use, and why do I use these?
- How has my thinking about teaching changed this year? Why?
- What were the most stressful times of the term/ year in my teaching? Is there anything I can do in future to alleviate this?
- What one aspect of my teaching do I want to work on next year?
You can think about these on your own, but it’s often useful to talk them through with a friend or colleague, or perhaps your module leader or supervisor. Hopefully you’ve had at least one peer review this year – this might be a good time to review this as well. If there are things that you’d like to work on but you’re not sure how to, or if you’re not sure how to respond to some of the challenges you’ve experienced this year, then you’re also very welcome to contact me (email: jessica.hancock at city.ac.uk) or one of my colleagues in LEaD’s academic team if you’d like to talk things through. Or you might want to post a comment or question below!