Reflecting on the skills gained, considering those skills in the context of students’ larger course of studies, and planning for the next steps that both instructors and students will take, brings a thoughtful course closure for both instructors and students. Yulia Levchenko, instructional designer for the College of Arts and Sciences, provides guidance for these reflections.
Instructor Reflection
As an instructor you can look back at the semester as a whole and review the course from the perspective of the backward design. You can ask the following questions regarding the desired results for the course, acceptable assessments, and learning activities and instructional materials:
Desired Results
- What long-term transfer goals were targeted in the course?
- What were the essential concepts that I intended for students to understand?
- What knowledge and skills did students acquire?
Acceptable evidence
- How do I know that students have achieved the desired results?
- What evidence do I have that the students achieved the desired understanding and proficiency?
Instruction organization
- What activities helped students gain knowledge and skills?
- What materials and resources worked best to accomplish these goals?
- What aspects of course organization and learning experiences contributed the most toward students’ success in the course?
Reflection is a part of a process of growth for you as an instructor and many elements can contribute to it. One of such elements is a mid-semester reflection that can help track student progress, important things that happened during the semester, points of frustration that you could fix for next time, brilliant ideas for the future that you completely forgot about, etc. You can help your future self by keeping track of this when it’s happening rather than waiting for the semester to end.
In the end of the course, the results of the mid-semester reflections in combination with the final reflections can help you analyze and celebrate students’ accomplishments, reflect on how your intentional teaching choices impacted students learning, and provide you with ideas on how to improve student experience and help them become independent learners.
Student Reflection
In the end of the semester students want a sense of accomplishment in the course, a feeling that the work over the past few months amounted to academic but also personal achievements, whether big or small. Activities dedicated to identifying and reflecting on students’ accomplishments can be carried out throughout the semester, but the key one needs to be the culmination of the course.
The goal of the end-of-the-semester activities is to help students reflect on the course and its individual elements, their own growth in the course, support them when they connect ideas that they encountered in the course, and plan for the future academic aspirations.
In 2002 study, Eggleston and Smith discovered that an overwhelming majority of students would like more closure in the end of the course. Here a few possible activities that can help you wrap up the course in a meaningful way and provide students with that sense of closure:
- Ask students to write a letter about their own development in the course and what they have learned.
- Assign to write “letters to successors” to students enrolled in the course in the future.
- Ask students to creating an informational brochure for incoming students on the major concepts from the course.
- Invite an outside group for comprehensive project presentations.
- Integrate service learning and helping into course endings.
After conducting your own reflection and reviewing students’ end-of-the-semester (and possibly mid-semester) reflection activities, you have enough data to begin adapting future plans. This step can include revisiting learning goals, revising teaching approaches, brainstorming new ways to increase student engagement, and better utilizing the principle of Universal Design for Learning. If you feel overwhelmed with the amount of revision that you might need to do, don’t be discouraged. An instructional designer for your college can help you revise the course and work with you to promote inclusive, innovative, research-informed, and effective teaching for all learners. All in all, reflective teaching helps us gather and interpret data so we can make informed choices for effective teaching in the future.
Tools for instructors
- An Introduction to Backward Design
- Becoming a Reflective Teacher
- Faculty Self-Evaluation of Teaching (rubrics, narrative, and questions)
- Instructor Self-Evaluation (reflection about assumptions and priorities that affect teaching)
- End-of-the-semester Activities