Looking Ahead to Finals, Feedback, and Spring
Congratulations to you on the last day of classes! You’ve led and inspired your students and facilitated their development. We hope exams and final projects go smoothly and that final grades show that your students have learned and grown in the ways you wanted them to do. In the week before Thanksgiving, we shared a few of the tributes students sent to faculty, and each one of you reading this deserves commendation on your hard work and your students’ progress. Part of what makes this teaching community so effective is your inveterate curiosity and your eagerness to determine how you can make learning experiences even better each time you teach. We admire your scholarly approach to teaching and your support for your students.
Some of you may be preparing to tackle a hefty grading load, collect student feedback, or tweak your course design for Spring 2026. Wherever you find yourself in the closing chapter of Fall 2025, we hope that you will take the time to think back on your teaching challenges and triumphs, as well as look ahead to an exciting new semester in January.
Reflecting on Teaching
In the hectic final days of the term, it can be challenging to find time to reflect on what went well and what we’d like to adjust for next time, but this is a good moment to pause and take stock. As the semester winds down, we can readily remember what worked well and what we might like to change for next time. We hope you’ll find a way to capture the useful information that comes from reflecting. When we get swept up in the rush to prepare to teach the same course next time, some of our best ideas might be forgotten, so it’s helpful to jot them down at the end of the semester (or better yet, throughout the term in a running list or alongside a copy of the class schedule).
When you’re reflecting on the teaching methods you used, their results, and implications for future courses, you may find you have some strategies worth sharing with a larger community of colleagues. There are many ways to share and discuss your work with others. You might do so informally in your department or program by sharing resources, giving and receiving feedback, having regular brown bag discussions of teaching, etc. You might also consider doing so more publicly by participating in our teaching showcase (advertised below) or a teaching conference in your discipline. You could even design a SoTL project and publish your classroom research.
Getting Ready for Grading
The final assessment in a course (whether paper, project, performance, exam, etc.) can be an opportunity for students to demonstrate how much they’ve learned throughout the semester. Before you start grading, it’s helpful to review what was most important for students to learn in the course. (Hopefully, the final project is designed to be an opportunity for students to show off their knowledge and skills.) Keeping your eye on the goals can help you resist being distracted by the minutiae. The more exhausted we get, the easier it is to be distracted by our pet peeves or by things that are actually outside of the scope of the evaluation criteria. We have all gone on thought tangents that make grading take longer and that aren’t really relevant to the learning goals anyway. When that happens, it’s helpful to take a short break and resume when you can focus. Then you can return to students’ work, asking, what should I really be grading here? If you focus your attention on those priorities, it can make grading less stressful, less time consuming, and more fair.
Interpreting SPCI Results
The work students turn in is one of the most important sources of evidence about their learning, and hence about the effectiveness of the learning design. At the end of the term, we also get another source of feedback from SPCIs. (This year the results will be available starting December 18.) There are well-known limitations to SPCI data, but they can also provide quite a bit of insight into how students are feeling about their learning, and how we can adjust some aspects of a course to reach them more effectively. It’s not necessarily easy to interpret the messages, though.
What do you do with the information students provide on these surveys? How do you interpret the quantitative and qualitative feedback? If you also collect midsemester feedback from students, how do you think about the relationship between the feedback you received during the middle and at the end of the course? Navigating these questions can be daunting, and it’s normal to feel anxious about receiving negative comments on the hard work we have put into our course design or teaching practices. But you don’t have to read this feedback alone. We are happy to help you analyze your SPCI results, identify trends, and develop strategies for course improvement based on constructive comments. If you’d like to meet with one of us to get support parsing SPCI data in order to bring it to bear for spring, we’ll be happy to work with you. To schedule a consultation, please email us at pro-teaching@fsu.edu.
We look forward to seeing you in Spring 2026!
2026 Provost’s Showcase of Scholarly Teaching
Friday, April 17th | 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. | Strozier Library Basement | More details on our website
We’re delighted to announce that CAT and FSU Libraries will host the third annual Provost’s Showcase of Scholarly Teaching on April 17, 2026. This event is an opportunity for you to share your teaching expertise and innovations with the larger campus community. Even if you’ve never thought about presenting at a pedagogical conference before, you likely have strategies and insights that could be of benefit to colleagues. We invite you to apply to host a roundtable discussion or present a poster.
If you would like to submit a proposal, please fill out our Application Form. The application due date is Feb. 1, 2026. We look forward to reading about your teaching!