Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Effective Teaching and feedback
Page last updated:
A course’s teaching and feedback should be designed together to actively support learning. Learning is a process of iterative improvement.
Reflective questions for course teams
- How do you foster student/staff relationships on the course? How do you set boundaries to protect staff time and staff wellbeing?
- Does the course team have a coherent communications strategy? Do you provide multiple communication channels for students? How do members of the course team communicate with students and with one another? Is communication effective?
- What do you do to develop a course culture of reciprocity and to build a sense of connection, interaction, peer learning and co-creation in a learning community? How do you encourage students to support one another’s learning? Does the course team encourage peer support mechanisms, e.g., course-based societies?
- How do you design learning activities to support student collaboration (e.g., through groupwork, peer evaluation or debate)? How do you organise collaborative activities to ensure all students feel included and have the best opportunity to succeed?
- How do your pedagogical approaches encourage deep learning (e.g., problem-based learning, flipped approaches, self-evaluation, peer-review)?
- Do you provide opportunities for students to actively engage in learning both inside and outside of timetabled sessions? Are these opportunities structured/scaffolded and differentiated?
- Is formative feedback integrated into the course in a way and at a time that is developmental? How do students access timely feedback they can reflect and act upon? Do you encourage students to seek, engage with, and take up feedback from other students, stakeholders and/or technologies (e.g., GenAI)?
- Do you work with students to develop constructive approaches to using feedback, to enable students to understand all feedback channels and to create a learning loop? Does feedback encourage students to improve their work and make links to their learning in other parts of the course?
- Do you scaffold students’ learning by breaking down requirements into aligned, scheduled and manageable learning activities? Do you support new students to work on small tasks with short deadlines, increasing the size of tasks and length of deadlines as a student progresses through their course?
- Are students made aware of detailed task requirements and the time a learning task would typically take to complete to a high standard?
- Are expectations clear? Do you communicate your belief, particularly for students from nontraditional backgrounds and disadvantaged groups, that they can achieve highly on the course? How do you do this?
- Do students know what high-quality work looks like? Do you provide exemplars, work through solutions in class, and share excellent work completed by students who have previously studied the course? If not, can you do this?
- How do you encourage students to draw on their strengths? How do you scaffold, promote and explicitly value students’ particular strengths on your course?
- How do you make sure all students are challenged appropriately and differentiate learning activities to engage students who are excelling and those who may be struggling? How do you scaffold support for the different ability levels of students whilst still maintaining a consistent approach to course requirements and criteria?
