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:

1. What was my favourite part of teaching this year? What can I do to replicate this in future?
2. What was the most challenging part of teaching? Would I do anything differently if this happens again?
3. How do I know that my students are learning?
4. What do I do when students aren’t learning in my classroom? Is this effective?
5. 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?
6. How am I encouraging my students’ curiosity?
7. What kinds of activities do I often use, and why do I use these?
8. How has my thinking about teaching changed this year? Why?
9. What were the most stressful times of the term/ year in my teaching? Is there anything I can do in future to alleviate this?
10. 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!

City runs regular Learning and Teaching Forums on a range of different subjects – these are open to anyone who’s interested, so PhD students are very welcome to come along. The format is usually a combination of presentations and activities. To give you an idea of what happens, you can take a look at the blog post I wrote about the most recent one which addressed the topic of classroom management. Here, we discussed something that’s a concern to people with all levels of experience of teaching, but can be a particular worry when you’re starting out, especially if you’re not sure if your status as a PhD student might affect how seriously students take your attempts at discipline (I know this is something that worried me). You might want to take a look at the slides that we used, or the Padlet where we shared solutions for common scenarios. I think the slide about ‘learned optimism’  provides a useful concept to think about if you might have a tendency to get into negative thought patterns about student behaviours (such as ‘everyone looks bored so I must be a boring teacher’ or ‘people are talking so I’m rubbish at controlling a class’). It’s similar to some of the things we talked about during the Establishing a Teaching Persona course – challenging the veracity of these generalisations or catastrophisations so that you can step back from the situation a little and reflect on a more balanced view of what went well and badly, which should mean that dealing with classroom issues becomes a bit more manageable.

The next Learning and Teaching Forum will be on the subject of play-based learning, 12-13:30 on Thursday 4th July – more details here. If this is something you think you might want to start doing in your teaching (or perhaps are already doing) then please do come along – it also involves a free lunch which is never a bad thing! Hope to see you there.

We all might like to think that the students leave our teaching sessions and then spend some time reflecting on what they’ve learnt, but it’s probably more common that they’ll be rushing off to another class, lunch, a job or back home with their mind  focused on what’s next. So it can be really useful to provide some space within your lesson to get the students to reflect. This can be done alone, with the students thinking or perhaps recording their thoughts in some free writing. It can also be beneficial to enable students to share reflections with each other – but how do you ensure that all students get an equal chance to speak?

One way to do this is by dividing students into pairs, and giving a set amount of time (perhaps 3 or 5 minutes) for each of them to speak. During this time, the other student only listens, and is only allowed to interrupt if the speaker has lost focus. After the time has elapsed, the pairs then switch round and the other student gets to talk whilst the first student listens attentively. Although some students might feel intimidated at first, the chance to have someone’s undivided attention is a rare privilege!

I’d suggest giving them prompts for the reflection, by providing questions such as:

• What are the key points you’ve learnt today?
• Is there anything you’re still confused by?
• What will you do to prepare for the session next week?

You could do this in small or large groups – in a large group, this will get noisy so I’d recommend having some sort of buzzer to provide a clear prompt for when to switch between listener and talker.

You could also extend this activity by asking students to spend a final couple of minutes at the end recording some of the points from their reflections, perhaps by using an online tool such as Padlet – that will show you if there are any common areas of misunderstanding, and give you an indication of what students have learned.

Have you tried anything similar? How did it work for you?

Many assessments in HE involve writing, and yet this is something that students often find intimidating, as writing within their discipline has particular rules and styles that often feel unnatural and constraining. In my experience, one solution to make the writing process a bit easier is to get students to do more writing in class – to show them that writing doesn’t have to be perfect, and to get them used to writing more regularly.

Students can also feel uncomfortable answering questions in front of others – especially if they feel like they haven’t had enough time to collect their thoughts. I think free writing can help with both of these issues when used in class.

Essentially, free writing is where a student writes something that’s only for them to see, and just writes for a set amount of time, without focusing on the quality of what they’re writing, or their spelling, grammar or style. You’d give them a prompt of an open-ended question about the topic of the lesson, and then give them a set amount of time (perhaps five minutes at first) to respond. Emphasise that the important thing is to keep writing, and not to worry too much about what they’re writing – tell them that if they can’t think of anything, they can start by writing that (perhaps in a positive form, such as ‘I don’t have an idea right now but I’m hoping one will come in a minute … ‘).

This exercise not only helps to take away some of the fear and perfectionism around writing and idea generating, but helps to increase writing fluency and gives students a safe space to try out and develop some responses to the question. This can be used in both small and large groups – in a large group, it can be an effective way of getting everyone to respond to a question without feeling like they’ve been put on the spot, or have to risk sharing with others.

I’ve found that this can be most useful with repeated use, as students can often be troubled by the idea of ‘just writing’ the first time they do it, and become more comfortable in subsequent exercises. Using it throughout a term or year also ensures that students keep writing in this low stakes way, rather than only writing when it comes to an assessment.

Have you used this before, or are you thinking of trying it out?