Rapid and concrete feedback on teaching
ETH has recently launched a scheme for arranging mutual classroom visits. This should encourage peer feedback to become an established part of teaching practice.
Lecturers sometimes feel like lone warriors: regular interaction with colleagues – a common feature in the research community – is not always part of their daily routine. But that’s about to change. Rector Günther Dissertori and the Lecturers’ Conference have together launched the initiative “Peer Feedback on Teaching” to address the situation.
The idea is simple: lecturers can register with LET (Teaching Development and Technology) if they would like to receive or give collegial feedback on teaching. A team from LET then forms suitable groups and sets up the initial contacts. The groups then organise everything else themselves.
Registration for Peer Feedback on Teaching
Lecturers simply have to state the courses for which they would like peer feedback and can provide specific details of colleagues they want to exchange feedback with. LET will then search for a suitable partner and provide tips and support for preparation, classroom visits and debriefing. Register now.
Rapid and concrete feedback
The first classroom visits already took place in Spring Semester 2023. Manuela Fischer is a lecturer in the Computer Science department and teaches a foundation course for students on other degree programmes. She applied for peer feedback because she only receives periodic input on her lectures due to the two-year rhythm of teaching evaluations. “Feedback from colleagues is also more concrete and I can use their suggestions directly to improve my own teaching,” she says.
The aim of the initiative is to establish a culture of open doors, says Günther Dissertori. “Hardly anything else provides more inspiration and creates a Eureka moment as the effect of feedback from colleagues. Mutual, critical exchange is normal in the world of research, but unfortunately less so in teaching.”
Dissertori experienced his own Eureka moment in the LET course “Teaching at ETH” with Sarah Shephard. Mutual classroom visits are an essential part of this course and the study of new methods is very systematic, based on a didactic experiment in one's own course. Dissertori hopes the new initiative will make such experiences possible outside the course as well, and so lower barriers to allow participants more in-depth reflection on their own teaching practice.
Didactic fellows as partners for teaching
Lecturers can also get rapid and informal input from the Didactic Fellows. This group of ten professors from seven departments have completed the Teaching at ETH programme, courses I and II, and themselves make classroom visits as part of these courses. They also serve as partners for interested parties to contact. Didactic Fellows are appointed by the Rector and provide him with a sounding board for strategic issues in teaching.
Florian Dörfler, Professor at the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET) is one such Fellow. Classroom visits can be a useful trigger for more in-depth reflection on one’s own teaching, he says: “I was giving a lecture on control technology with some very theoretical content. Before I visited the course, I was convinced that interactive teaching elements would never work well in this type of lecture. I thought that teaching had to be just as I’d experienced it in the past: tough and frontal. I had no other role models.” Today, group tasks are a fixed component of his teaching, and students’ attentiveness and mood have improved significantly. And what’s more: “Teaching now gives me much more pleasure and a greater sense of fulfilment.”
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