Jan 17 2008
Reflections on Software Design F2007
This past autumn I taught Software Design at Olin College. It was an excellent experience, and I enjoyed myself a great deal. As I was experimenting with a number of things (a transition from material found in HtDP to an OO introduction to GUI programming, pair programming, the use of version control with novice programmers, extended projects in a first programming course, etc.), I was very interested in getting good feedback regarding how the course went. Translated, I mean “better feedback than a bog-standard feedback form would yield.”
I often close my courses with a discussion as to how the course went. This year, I took the results of the 45 minute discussion that the students and I had, and reflected on how I might evolve the course the next time I teach it. I then pushed those reflections (4 pages of summary and 10 pages of reflection) back to the students, asking for them to verify whether they felt my proposed changes captured the spirit of their comments and criticisms. Of the 20 in the class, 6 came back to me with their thoughts.
I have now consolidated my proposed changes and the student comments into one document. I’ve titled it Feedback as a conversation (PDF, 5MB), and have made it available online (if you are interested… mostly, this is so I can point students and colleagues at it). Based on a quick poke around the literature, I’m curious whether the notion of “feedback as conversations” (in the spirit of the Cluetrain Manifesto) has made its way into the academic discourse. I may try and dig through this literature, as I have never actually seen anyone go through this kind of iterative, reflective process with their students before. Certainly, it is outside my experience at Kenyon, Indiana, and Kent.
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Wow.
I’m encouraged to see you taking so many concrete steps to get genuine feedback on your course. Reading “Feedback as a Conversation” made it clear to me how strong your motivation to improve your course is. I’m glad to see you breaking out of habitual feedback methods. I’m sure you’ve seen that effort on your part helps break students of their own feedback habits and creates some useful content.
I hope you’ve shared this document with the rest of the faculty.
I’ll make a point to introduce myself to you next time I’m on campus.
Thanks for posting this.
Thanks for sharing! I’m saving this post and your document in my “when I become a TA or a professor, I must read these things again” folder of things that I’m using to kick myself into thinking about the kind of teaching that I want to do. By doing this, you’re modeling to your students (and us) the notion that a person ought to think about what they’ve done, what they’ve learned, and what they are going to do as a result of it.
Out of curiosity, how long did this entire process take you? I wonder if the time-intensiveness (or unknown time-intensiveness) might be a reason that other profs may not have adopted this sort of thing more widely.
The Olin feedback took longer to process, because there was more of it, and it was the first time I had written this kind of document. So, it was first a 10-page beast, which I finally reduced to a series of bullets and one paragraph of summary each. So, a number of hours (3-6h of work, probably).
The document I produced today, however, took less time. In part, because I knew what I wanted to produce: something concise. So, I went straight to the bullets, and summarized right away. All told, the summary of CMPSC 111 F08 took 30 minutes of class time to collect feedback and discuss, and I spent 1.5 hours distilling it into the document I posted.
Not shared (for no particular reason) is the midterm feedback, which helped me focus my thoughts on what the students had to say in their comments at the end of this semester.
So in truth, this is not horribly intense. If any of my students read the document and respond, I’ll probably have another 30 minutes to an hour of time spent incorporating their thoughts. All told, though, this is seems like a valuable way for me to develop a portfolio of reflections that I can look back on in the future. I’ll let you know in another year or two if they’re useful documents.
(I did revisit the Olin document while writing this one, which was interesting. Clearly, after another semester or two of data, I’ll be able to put together a meta-review and see how I’m doing overall.)