Really Simple Series: Five-Minute Feedback Form

Getting feedback from students can help you:

1. Check student understanding at an individual level.
2. Reflect on your teaching in terms of how lesson content is conveyed and understood.

But it can also have practical and theoretical drawbacks:

• In terms of the former, for example, it can be time-consuming to create and interpret.

• In terms of the latter there are potential expectancy problems – students effectively tell you what they think you want to hear.

One way to avoid these problems is to develop a quick and simple way of gathering feedback – and this is where the five-minute feedback form comes into play. The form is given to students to complete at the end of a lesson and allows you to gather evaluation data in a way that focuses on identifying:

• content, rather than delivery: the focus is on identifying what students think they have learnt.

• teaching and learning mismatches: identifying any discrepancies between what the teacher sees as the most important lesson content and what the students believe they have learnt.

• student learning issues: consistent mismatches between what the teacher views as important content and individual student perceptions can be identified and remedied.

• teaching issues: if students in a class are consistently failing to identify important content the teacher can reflect on the teaching process in order to find ways to make it more effective.

Download Five-Minute Feedback Form pdf