Evaluate practice and respond to feedback

Evaluating and reflecting on your teaching and professional development is central to becoming a more effective teacher. This section considers how you might apply these principles in your teaching practice, including prompts for undertaking professional development to improve your teaching and share what you have learned with others. One way to think about evaluating your practice might be to ask yourself "What do I want to know or demonstrate about my teaching?" This helps you to decide what sort of feedback you need, and therefore, what sort of evaluation needs to be carried out. 

Formative evaluation asks “How is my teaching going?”

It provides information on the effectiveness of your teaching. You should collect data at the early or mid-way points of the course, allowing you to assess your performance and modify your teaching accordingly. Formative evaluation can be directed at the student learning experience as a whole (levels of satisfaction, engagement and provided support) or a particular aspect of teaching and learning (the formative evaluation of a new teaching resource). Formative evaluation is geared towards professional development and improvement.

Summative evaluation asks “How did my teaching go?”

It is usually carried out at the end of a course and generally measures the student’s learning experience overall (levels of satisfaction, engagement and provided support). However, a formative evaluation can be directed towards a particular aspect of teaching (e.g. a new approach such as case based learning). Summative evaluation informs summary judgements of teachers, the appropriateness of course material, learning, teaching and assessment methods, and provides information for quality assurance and external review.

The University is implementing a new centralised, online system to support summative course and teaching evaluations for most formal courses in semester one 2016. The system is to be known internally as ‘SET’ (Summative Evaluation Tool).