1. Professors - Evaluate Your Teaching Effectiveness After the first three weeks of class, your students will have gotten a better sense of the class and what it will entail. They will have had an opportunity to see you in action, and they will have begun to know you and your expectations. They also will have seen how the class typically flows, so their feedback at this point can be much more directed and specific than it was after the first class day (another place I recommend asking students for feedback). The following are some ideas you might use somewhere around the third week of class: Thumbs up/thumbs down. List aspects of the course that students will have experienced so far (e.g., small-group work, homework problem sets, guest speakers, lectures, textbook, readings.) Ask students to give each of the aspects a rating. A thumb up is positive; a thumb down is negative. You can compare and contrast the responses that you get and gain an overall sense from the class about what is going well and what is not going so well. You can always come back to the class for clarification if ratings were mixed. I have done this where I had students literally hold their thumbs up or down (or sideways) and did a quick estimation. I have also had students circle a thumb up, thumb down, or thumb sideways on a sheet that listed the aspects on which I was interested in obtaining their feedback. Either way works (and it's quick). A mock evaluation. Ask students the actual questions (or at least a few of the ones that you are most concerned about) that will appear on the end-of-term formal evaluation. Tell them that you are working to make this the best class possible and that their feedback is critical to your being able to accomplish your goal. Provide some instruction on the kinds of responses that are helpful. You can guide students into using the kind of language that is most helpful to you and that best demonstrates to your department chair the kind of teacher you are. For example, I

2. often asked students the first day of class what they had heard about me. After some 'wait time,' someone would say, "That you're funny and that they've never worked so hard in a class, but never learned so much either." I told them that this was VERY commonly written on my evaluations at the end of the semester...and it was. Learning logs. Learning logs are full- or half-size sheets of paper with one question at the top. I like using questions such as "What do you think the professor of this class believes about teaching and learning? How do you know?" "What is the most surprising thing you have learned so far this semester? Explain." "If you were going to make a recommendation to a student taking this class next term, what would you want that person to know right from the first day of class?" Just choose one of the questions to ask - or tell students that they can choose from any of the three. Immediately after students complete the learning log, the professor collects them to read for the feedback provided. In some cases, you may write comments on them before returning them to students, but most often, you are keeping them for the information provided and they are not returned to students. Search about rate my professor.