It's important to encourage your students to give you feedback for your work as a PAL Leader as it will help your performance and better cater for their needs.
This page has 4 quick and easy ways you can ask your students for feedback.
You can do this at the end of every session or just a few times over the year.
Give each of your students a post-it note. At the end of the session, ask your students to plot on the bullseye how confident they feel about the topic/assignment that has been covered in the session. The yellow area should represent feeling very confident, and the white area should represent not feeling confident at all.
This can help identify where the students are in their understanding. It can also measure whether the session was successful in helping students to learn what they needed to know, or whether more work needs to be done.
Stop, Start, Keep is an effective way of retrieving varied and constructive feedback in peer review.
The 'Stop' refers to one thing that the person being reviewed should stop doing - something that is incorrect, irrelevant or excessive.
The 'Start' refers to one thing that the person being reviewed should start doing - something that would enhance, improve or that is missing.
The 'Keep' refers to one thing that the person being reviewed should keep doing - something that is relevant, engaging and meets objectives.
Remember the old 'suggestion box'? Sure, it was often filled with insults, criticism or just someone's complaint, but it can also be the place to find a hidden gem that can make a huge difference to your PAL sessions. Make a point of letting your students know they can genuinely leave you a note anytime, insisting that they are anonymous.
Another way doing this is to stick flip chart paper around the room with different questions written on each one and ask the students to write their answers on a post-it note and stick them on the papers.
By using TEL tools such as Padlet or Google Forms, you can devise questions that allow for more open-ended responses, which can mean a more personal approach. We all know some students don't like to say certain things with an audience of their peers, so one of the main benefits of these tools is that the responses are anonymous. Examples of questions include:
The details in the responses will really help you shape your next steps in the delivery of the course.
This is a great way of getting feedback immediately after your session.Print off the following statements:
Stick these on the wall in numerical order. Then ask your students to write their names or a sign representing them on a post-it note and stick it under the statement that is true about them. Do this at the beginning of the session and at the end. This wil give you a clear indication of how useful your session was. Again, you can stress that the feedback can be anonymous to encourage participation.