What can instructors submit for feedback and how do Student Teaching Consultants provide feedback?
You are welcome to submit any course syllabus for review and feedback, whether complete or a rough draft. We encourage you to ask specific questions you are invested in so that you can receive better understanding from a student perspective. SaLT’s Student Teaching Partners provide insights by offering overviews, asking questions, and providing suggestions informed by their experiences and research-based strategies in teaching and learning.
You are welcome to submit the assignment, project, and/or prompt expectations as you share them with your students in your courses. We encourage you to ask specific questions about the document, as this will inform how Student Teaching Partners read it and provide feedback. We draw on Transparency in Learning and Teaching to review and provide feedback on assignments or project expectations. Student Teaching Partners use a transparent design template to provide insights, ask questions, and provide suggestions informed by their experiences and research-based strategies in teaching and learning.
You are welcome to submit any assessment and/or feedback frameworks, such as course grading policies, rubrics for specific assignments, guidelines, or checklist expectations. We encourage you to ask specific questions related to these documents for meaningful review and feedback. Student Teaching Partners draw on Transparency in Learning and Teaching and culturally negotiated assessment strategies to inform their reviews and feedback via a set of guided questions.
You are welcome to submit your Teaching Philosophy Statements along with any document for feedback, as these statements help our Student Teaching Partners better understand your goals, values, and intentions as an instructor. Research demonstrates that effective teaching philosophy statements are linked to good teaching, which is linked to active learning and student success (Schönwetteret al., 2002;Titus & Grembler, 2010; Winklemes, 2013). Our Student Teaching Consultants are prepared to review and provide feedback on teaching philosophy statements informed by best practices in writing effective teaching philosophy statements and strategies in teaching and learning.
You are welcome to submit other teaching documents, such as mini-lectures, in-class activities, mini in-class reflections, mid-term reflection surveys, etc. These documents are reviewed by drawing on Transparency in Learning and Teaching.
What other support does CTE SaLT HSI offer?
Our Student Teaching Partners are available to collaborate with you to design a series of questions for anonymous questionnaires and/or focus groups centered on collecting feedback from students enrolled in your courses to learn more about their learning experiences and your teaching practices. Similar to the institution’s end of course evaluations, our student feedback surveys have the benefit of providing you with feedback before the semester ends, giving you the opportunity to address student and classroom concerns in real time as you see fit. The questions can be co-designed with you and the Student Teaching Partner, who can collect responses and/or conduct the focus groups as you see fit. Subsequently, they will provide you with the anonymous responses as well as a short overview report from a student perspective.
After our Student Teaching Partner’s finish conducting their feedback on teaching documents, you will coordinate with them to schedule a one-on-one conversation to have an open discussion about their feedback. This can be conducted face-to-face (at either our Brownsville/Edinburg SaLT HSI office) or online via Zoom or Teams.
The SaLT HSI office also works with faculty to create and co-lead development workshops, such as our “Collaboration in Teaching and Learning” series, co-host panels, and offer general support in writing and updating teaching philosophies and other teaching-related documents outside of our partnerships.
We also offer a professional development series titled "Colaborando in Teaching & Learning: A Student and Faculty Professional Development Partnership Series," where instructors across academic disciplines can be paired with trained CTE Student Teaching Consultants in a semester-long partnership and professional development series. Student Teaching Consultants conduct weekly observations and reviews, provide feedback on teaching materials, and co-design feedback on teaching surveys, focus groups, and teaching activities. Research demonstrates that effectiveness of instructional strategies must happen in conversation with students, especially instructional practices that aim to be accessible educational environments.
Please contact the Center for Teaching Excellence (cte@utrgv.edu) and/or Dra. Alyssa Cavazos (alyssa.cavazos@utrgv.edu) with any inquiries related to SaLT HSI.
To learn more about the submission process for Student Teaching Consultant Feedback, please visit this page on our website.