Prime your students: you’ll get better feedback!

Introduce the purpose and use of SPOT surveys in class. Here is some inspiration for planning your talking points: 

• I care about your learning, and I will read your feedback thoughtfully. It is helpful to share with students your commitment to their learning and that you do read and think about students’ feedback comments. Sometimes students are surprised to learn that instructors – or anyone – read their surveys, and they are more willing to respond with thoughtful and constructive feedback if they know that you will read what they say.
• SPOT surveys are anonymous, and I won’t receive your comments until after grades are submitted. I will use your feedback to help me better calibrate the course in the future. This statement is even more meaningful if you can provide an example of a time when you previously used student feedback to improve the course. For example, you might mention that a student’s comment during office hours inspired you to adjust a lecture or assignment in a particular way, or you could remind them how you used feedback that you gathered at a previous point in the term.
• I can make the most of feedback that is specific and actionable. Any researcher who has ever groaned over comments from the notorious “Reviewer 2” knows that even experts sometimes struggle to provide concrete, constructive, and actionable feedback. Students likewise need guidance on how to provide useful feedback. You might share that although it’s gratifying to hear that students loved the course, it’s even better – and more helpful – to know how a specific assignment or course activity was valuable to their learning. Similarly, critical feedback is more helpful if students are specific about how something had an impact on their learning. Some instructors even share examples of useful feedback they have received in the past. 

Offer Class time for Students to Fill out the Surveys - with thoughtful timing and structure. 

Offering students a bit of time – 5-10 minutes should be sufficient – during class to fill out their surveys ensures that students have dedicated time to thoughtfully provide feedback and troubleshoot accessing the survey, if necessary. 

Schedule the time during the middle of the class. Although it is tempting to schedule this time for the end of class so that you can move on to the next thing, students may get the same idea and leave rather than stay to fill out the survey. Instead, we recommend scheduling time for the middle of class and then reconvening for a final activity. 

Remind students about ALL of the elements of the course. Planning time for students to fill out feedback surveys in the middle of the class session can work especially well if you use the beginning of class for a productive reflection activity in which students recall all of the elements of the course and celebrate how far they have come since the first day. This can be an effective way to review for final assessments and also encourage students to reflect on the entire term, rather than focusing on final projects or upcoming course deadlines when giving feedback.  You can review a variety of examples for end-of-semester activities on our website.

Send a follow up reminder. After class, you can check how many (but not which) students have filled out the survey. There are options for automated reminders, or you can draft your own custom reminder using some of the ideas in the section above.

Reflecting on and Responding to feedback

If your heart starts beating a little quicker when you receive notification that your feedback is ready, you’re not alone! The following strategies can make the process a little easier: 

Choose a time when you feel ready to thoughtfully process the feedback.  

Consider processing your feedback with another person. Some instructors make a plan to read students' feedback with a trusted colleague. You can also consider making sense of your feedback in a confidential consultation with a Center for Teaching staff member. 

Look for both patterns and outliers. The patterns help you understand what to prioritize and how to invest your time for the greatest impact. Outliers can reveal unexpected strengths or isolated concerns that nevertheless merit attention. 

Think about sustainable change. After analyzing your feedback, you might find that you develop a lengthy list of To-Dos. It can be helpful to remember that intentional, focused change is sometimes the most impactful. Consider identifying one or two priorities to concentrate on during the next term. 

Consider what you might want to document for your teaching portfolio. This can include successes, feedback that is helping you to make changes, or goals that you want to strive for in your teaching. If this work will be part of an upcoming review, consider consulting with your DEO or other leadership about how best to document these things, including in your narrative self-assessment. There is also a growing collection of guidance on the Office of the Provost Assessment of Teaching website. 

Leverage tools thoughtfully. Some instructors may turn to AI to assist with developing themes from student feedback. The research is still evolving, and while some early studies suggest that AI can help faculty members to identify themes, qualitative research experts also encourage exercising caution. If you are thinking about using AI to analyze a large set of feedback data, keep in mind that AI might over or under-report themes, produce themes that are too generic to be actionable, or hallucinate data that isn’t there. For this reason, it is best to think of AI as a first pass through the feedback, at most.  A human check is critical, especially if we want students to understand that instructors really do read their comments. If you do use AI, remember to use Copilot. The University of Iowa’s Copilot Chat license, available to authenticated Iowa users, provides enterprise data protection and ensures that data entered will not be used to train the models. 

Prepare for building feedback into the culture of future courses. Many instructors find that the feedback process is more helpful and less anxiety-inducing when they make it a recurring part of the course. Instructors can leverage the Midterm SPOT Check tool or work with the Center for Teaching to get midterm student feedback. Doing so can help catch issues while there is still time to recalibrate for that semester, help demonstrate to students that you value their feedback, and provide students with helpful practice providing thoughtful and constructive feedback.