Graduate Teaching Workshop - Course Postmortem
Idris Hsi, December 1, 2000
The term is over. The class has ended. You’ve turned in all the grades and you’re done, right? Well, officially, yes. But part of learning is taking moments to reflect on the past. This is a good opportunity to prepare the class to be taught again. A course postmortem is an analysis on the class - the students who attended, the assessment materials, the lectures, and the results. The basic question you ask is “Did the course go the way you planned and expected it to?” In other words, did students do as well as you thought they would on the projects and tests? Did they seem to comprehend all the lectures? Was the textbook useful? And so on. After you finish this analysis, make a note of it somewhere significant, preferably on the class web pages. This way you, or other instructors or teaching assistants can refer back to it a year later and make the proper adjustments. Other parts of the Postmortem also involve archiving and storing projects and papers that were not picked up by students, and saving all the spreadsheets and grading records used to assign student grades.
· Reflect on how the course went.
· To leave a record of what happened for the next instructor/teaching assistant
1. If a course evaluation process is not available through the school, design your own form and hand it out to your students on the last day of class to get feedback.
2. Have a meeting with the course instructor and the other teaching assistants (if there are any). Talk about how the class went and how to make it better. Review any feedback that you were able to obtain from the students. This is good to do right after assigning final grades while it’s still fresh in everyone’s minds.
3. Make notes of any design decisions that you made in designing the syllabus.
4. Make sure that the teaching materials and web pages are organized and can be transferred easily to another site or person. This should include the syllabus, lecture notes, assignment descriptions, blank exams, and so on. You may want to create an area for showing student projects so that future students have a baseline for their own projects.
5. Make sure to archive all assignments and homeworks that were not picked up by students in a file box. This archive should also include any exams that you have kept. You may need to keep these materials for a year or two. Make sure to store the grading criteria with these materials so you remember how you assigned grades.
6. Archive all records and spreadsheets used to calculate grades.
7. Leave a record for future instructors and teaching assistants to follow.
· Did the students perform to your expectations? Why or why not (e.g. motivation, difficulty of assessment materials, poor lectures)? Was this group a statistical outlier? Were there specific things in the design of the course that may have produced those variations?
· If you had group projects, did you learn anything about how groups interact? Were students distributed evenly in terms of interest, skill level, and knowledge?
· How were the individual assessment materials such as exams and tests? How did students handle them? Was there information missing or too much information? Did they have the right level of difficulty and depth?
· How was the grading criteria and the grading procedures?
· Did assignments and exams make it back to the students in a timely manner?
· Were the points distributed appropriately?
· Were there any problems or questions about grades that could be resolved with some foresight for the next class?
· How were the lectures?
· Were there particular topics that didn’t work or that needed an extra day?
· Did the lecture schedule work?
· How was the textbook (if there is one)? Were the students happy with the book? Is there a better book that could be used for next time?
· How were the other reading materials, web resources, or tutorials?
· What kind of material should be incorporated into the class to bring it up to date on the next iteration?
· What kinds of things could be done to make the class more enjoyable or a better learning experience in the future?
· On the class web page, leave a page and a link on the first page that has the following:
· Grading criteria for all the assessment material (except for exams - that’s up to the instructor).
· Electronic copies of any handouts or references used by the class.
· A summary of the class postmortem including the kinds of design decisions used to structure the class and the results.
· Suggestions for future instructors to look at.
· A record of who to contact for further questions on this particular class.