CELL Blog | Center for Engaged Learning in the Law

I just completed a Small Group Instructional Diagnosis with one of my colleagues. I’d read about the SGID process but had never experienced it until today. My colleague is an experienced educator who is in her first year of teaching Legal Research and Writing at Gonzaga. She wanted to gather formative feedback from her students that went deeper than the end-of-the-semester numerical and narrative student evaluations.

Last week, my colleague and I met to plan the SGID process. She agreed to produce a document that divided her (17) students into groups of three or four. We discussed the types of feedback she hoped to gather and I drafted the following handout.

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Small Group Feedback to Professor ________

The purpose of this activity is to provide feedback to Professor ______about your learning and her teaching. In your small group, please address the four questions below. For each question, please record one or two responses on which the group reaches consensus. You have about 10 minutes to do so.

1. What aspects of Professor _______’s classroom teaching are most effective for you?

2. Evaluate the Writer’s Workshop. As a result of the Writer’s Workshop are you better able to diagnose and remedy problems in your own writing?

3. What aspects of Professor _______’s teaching are least effective for you?

4. What suggestions do you have to enhance Professor_______’s teaching and your learning in this class?
***

Earlier this week, my colleague described the SGID process briefly to her students. Today, I observed the first half of her class and then facilitated the SGID process for the final 25 minutes of class. Students spent 10 minutes in their small groups. Then in a large group sessionwe listed on a whiteboard the responses on which the students had consensus. One of the students captured the list on a computer and emailed me the results. An hour later, my colleague and I discussed the SGID process and results.

My colleague appreciated the confirmation that many aspects her teaching were working well for students. She also welcomed the students’ thoughtful suggestions about how the course could be even more effective for them. As she left my office, she was planning how to implement several student suggestions and how to explain her rationale for several of her teaching methods.

The SGID experience gave me hope. The students were insightful, respectful, and professional. They took the process seriously, welcomed the opportunity to provide formative feedback, and worked well cooperatively. Likewise, my colleague was insightful about her own teaching decisions, respectful of her students as learners, and professional in her approach to developing as a teacher. She really gets that the bottom line is not our performance but our students’ learning—our performance is relevant to our students learning—but our performance should not be an end in itself.