Health and Psychology

I'm completing an online course and a certificate course as a student.  I'm teaching a class that will be ending in a few weeks, and starting up teaching at a couple of schools.  I'm also getting ready to do formal evaluations of my professional staff at my company.  I think the big difference between my staff and students and myself as a student or teacher is that my staff and students already know how they are doing.  The evaluation process is ongoing, informal and constant.  When the formal evaluations are done it will be a formality to an ongoing process.

As a student in one course I've turned in 8 assignments and have received grades on 5.  In another course I received the certificate(s) and course completion, but there's no feedback.  As a teacher I ask for feedback from students on an ongoing basis, but it's such a novel concept, that I seldom get much usable or specific information.  At many institutions, including the ones I current teach at, students are asked to give feedback to teachers anonymously either at the end of the year or mid-term and class-end.  While anonymous feedback will lend itself to more specific criticism, it also gives the student a false sense of privacy--I almost always know who the critiques were from.  It also then puts me in a position of needing to act like I don't know where the critique came from.

On some teaching site online I found the following form to help simplify teacher feedback.  It provides smiley/frownie faces in addition to a rating.

At least the supplementary questions give some information on perception.  But in most cases, the feedback is too little and too late to produce change.  It's really imperitive that students moving into situations where ongoing feedback is a requirement, (we've spent lots of time and effort at introducing TQM (Total Quality Management) principles into business, manufacturing, healthcare and now teaching), but we aren't spending nearly enough time, if any time at all, in teaching students how to evaluate.

We need to spend far more time in teaching students how to evaluate faculty, how to evaluate coworkers, how to evaluate project participants, and how to evaluate themselves, in order to adequately prepare them to enter into a workforce where these processes are increasingly common and where feedback through social media and general media is almost instantaneous and often harsh and off track.  As the work-world moves more and more into group based processes, both in real time and online, the process of ongoing dialogue and feedback are crucial to making projects successful.  The more we introduce this into the classroom the more students will be prepared for these challenges in the future.