Get to know your students
Know who you will be working with before they set foot in your physical or virtual classroom and check in on them along the way!
We want to support our students’ learning, and with a pre-quarter survey (also called the start of the quarter survey) you can get to know who will be in your classroom. This is also a good opportunity to ask your students to share any challenges they anticipate they might face while participating in your course or access to materials that they will need to succeed. Check out how you can add this sample pre-quarter survey to your Bruin Learn site. There is also this sample pre-quarter survey created in Google form that asks similar questions to the one found in Bruin Learn (TIP: type copy at the end of the Google form URL to make a copy of the form into your Google Drive).
I’m still caught off guard when students are not aware of campus resources that are available to them, such as telehealth and in-person services including COVID-19 testing. A pre-quarter survey can help you uncover available campus resources that is readily available to students. Quick tip: You can share the link to UCLA’s Student Affairs page which features services on campus and how to get to resources for Academic & Advising, Community, Health & Wellness, and Basic Needs & Safety.
A mid-quarter survey is a good time to check in with your students and where they are in their learning. Feeedback a couple of weeks into the quarter can help inform you on your teaching — what is working and what is not working — rather than waiting until the end of the quarter to find out. This will also give you an opportunity to adjust your class to support your students. Here is a template of a mid-quarter survey that you can add to your course in Bruin Learn and another sample mid-quarter survey using Google forms.
Further Reading and Additional Resources on surveying your students
Improving Teaching With Expert Feedback— From Students
Although Edutopia focuses on K-12, this article shares insight on why collecting feedback from students is important and ways to center surveys around providing students with a voice. After all, feedback from students can inform instructors on how they can improve their teaching practices.
5 Reasons You Should Seek Your OWN Student Feedback
In this Cult of Pedagogy article, author Jennifer Gonzalez shares 5 benefits for seeking student feedback, as well as step-by-step ways to ask good (and quality) questions, to collect feedback, and to act on them. She also calls out that “… at the college level, student evaluations can significantly impact a professor’s promotion and tenure” and to act on the feedback “while there’s still time to troubleshoot” to improve student learning.
Author Hedreich Nichols shares 8 questions to help you find your implicit biases and positionality to help you think about actions you can do to make your teaching more equitable and inclusive.