Curious about part 1? Check out the first five tips here.
6. Do some spring cleaning
Many teachers assess more than is needed. That’s why it’s advisable to check with your programme director to ensure you’re only formally assessing what’s necessary and that your requirements are clear and straightforward. For example: a part-time degree programme at the School of Busines and Economics (SBE) has rethought when and how often it formally assesses the learning objective Social and Professional Skills. They took into account that all enrolled students are already employed and assumably demonstrate some basic competencies in these areas.
From there, consider whether you could scale down the number of assessments - could one or two activities cover all your learning objectives? In quite a few SBE courses for example, students have two assessments. They work in teams on real-life projects for an external organization (business, NGO, start-up, or public institution). They are asked to research a problem (Academic and Research Skills), apply theoretical frameworks, develop practical recommendations (Bridging Theory and Practice), and present their findings in writing and in a professional presentation for the organization (Social Professional Skills). After the group project, each student submits a brief individual reflective portfolio documenting their learning process, team dynamics, skills development, and personal growth (Broadening Your Horizon and Self Awareness). This frees up the remaining activities to focus on practice or formative feedback.
Additionally, reflect on whether it might be more efficient to assess the process rather than just the final result. To streamline further, look for opportunities to use in-class time for assessments or feedback whenever possible.
7. Standardize your grading process and feedback
Assessing and providing feedback takes a lot of time. However, there are ways and tools available to make this process easier for you as a teacher. Standardize your assessment by using rubrics. Rubrics provide a list of criteria and a scale of level descriptions that indicate how well the student meets each criterion. Rubrics support a transparent and consistent way of assessing, and they also make the assessment process more efficient because it clearly indicates what to focus on and how to assess it. If you don’t already have rubrics, check out our didactic tip on how to develop rubrics.
Another tool to help you save time while providing feedback to large amounts of student assignments is AnnotatePRO. With this tool, you can create a feedback library that you can reuse. This way, you only need to write the feedback once and can reuse the same feedback the next time with just two clicks. You can also share your feedback library with colleagues.
8. Model your expectations before and after the assessment
Provide students with clear expectations and feedforward regarding the level and quality of work that you expect of them. Provide them with practice materials or worked examples, such as past exams and previous assignment submissions, accompanied by detailed guidance. While past exams are often included in Canvas courses, they are not always supplemented with an explanation to help students understand what to focus on.
After an exam or assignment, consider sharing a so-called pattern report - a summary highlighting common strengths, areas of confusion, and challenges, along with actionable feedback for improvement. This approach can help to reduce the number of inspection enrolments and enhance overall learning outcomes.
9. Use peer feedback
As a teacher, it’s not always necessary to provide all feedback to students yourself. Students can often support each other by clarifying concepts, enhancing understanding, encouraging motivation, and identifying correct versus incorrect answers. This leaves room for you to focus your expertise on guiding students to recognize gaps in their knowledge, explore new or related directions, and adopt alternative strategies for tackling challenging topics.
Furthermore, students can potentially learn more from peer feedback than teacher feedback. That's because teacher feedback is the expert talking, so students blindly accept it as truth. But when the feedback comes from a peer, they question the feedback and start thinking critically about whether they trust the feedback and if they want to use it. This increases deeper learning. However, good peer feedback is something students must also first learn to give. Share these knowledge clips with your students, teaching them what good peer feedback is, why giving peer feedback is valuable and how to communicate feedback well. Check also the do’s and don’ts for an effective peer feedback process.
10. Use AI to do some of your tasks
Nowadays, there are many tools out there to make your work easier and help you save time. For example, generative AI can take away lots of the more dull and repetitive work, so you can focus on the teaching jobs that bring you joy. VU CTL has developed an AI tool to help you get inspired or improve your educational design. Six different educational situations are created by the tool to help you with: finding a solution for a teaching problem, teaching activities, creating a course syllabus, creating an exam, creating a lesson plan and creating rubrics. Try the AI tool here.
This didactic tip is written in collaboration with the SBE Center for Teaching and Learning.