Reflect on your remote teaching practice

Expanded guide: Reflect on your remote teaching practice

Reflecting on your teaching practice allows you to identify strengths as well as areas for improvement. Reflection is an important part of assessing your teaching effectiveness. These strategies help you create opportunities for reflection on your own or with colleagues. 

Take time to reflect on your remote teaching practice using these specific strategies:

This diamond icon ♦ in the text indicates that there is content in the right sidebar that relates to that particular strategy.

To discuss your unique teaching and technology needs, schedule a consultation with an ATS instructional designer at instructionaldesign@ucdavis.edu. For questions about pedagogical and teaching strategies, contact the Center for Educational Effectiveness: cee@ucdavis.edu.

Take time to reflect on your remote teaching practice

Spending time thinking about your teaching practice can make your instruction more effective and more efficient.

  • Keep a teaching journal to reflect on your remote teaching practice. A teaching journal can help you think about what your teaching practices are, as well as help you understand the beliefs that lead you to engage in those practices. Does your reasoning hold up in the remote teaching context? Are there changes you will need to make as you approach teaching in a remote environment?  After you teach a remote session, jot down a few notes about what worked and what didn’t during your remote live or asynchronous session. As you write, think about why a particular practice did or did not work in the remote context, and think of ways to change the practice so that it is more effective or replace it with a more effective one.
    • Technology that supports this: Google Docs, a paper notebook
  • Get feedback from students by scheduling a Mid-Quarter Inquiry. Take occasional surveys of your class to see how remote learning is going for them. You might construct your own survey or request an Equity, Engagement and Inclusion Mid-Quarter Inquiry from CEE. You can also obtain feedback from students by asking them to do a Quick Write, during or outside of class, in which they respond to open-ended questions about how the online class format is going for them. Use the feedback from MQIs or student responses to assess your teaching materials and practices and make necessary changes for remote learning. ♦1, 2, 3
  • Collaborate with colleagues on reflective activities. Colleagues can be a great resource for shedding new light on our remote teaching practice. Consider inviting colleagues in your department to engage in a Zoom conversation around remote teaching and learning. Having open discussions with colleagues who are also teaching remotely can help us learn about new strategies and build common understandings about effective online teaching.  Consider seeking out trusted colleagues for “coaching” conversations based on online Zoom peer observations. These conversations are facilitated by mutually establishing clearly-defined roles and expectations for the observations. Prior to observations, you and your colleague can discuss the desired focus so both instructors know what information to collect for follow up discussions.
    • Technology that supports this:  Zoom
  • Join a remote on-campus learning community or discussion group.  CEE Learning Communities provide multiple ongoing opportunities for reflection on teaching practice. Each community is composed of an interdisciplinary group of instructors who come together to enhance their instructional approaches, investigate instructional change, and share their experience in employing research-based strategies in their teaching, both remote and face-to-face.  Another opportunity to interact with colleagues is Teaching², a group that meets three times per quarter to discuss a book related to teaching and learning. Both types of community provide a supportive environment where members can experiment with new approaches to teaching, share successes and challenges, and reflect on their own face-to-face and remote teaching practice. ♦4, 5
    • Technology that supports this: Zoom
  • Seek out teaching-focused organizations in your discipline. Discipline-specific organizations (e.g., American Society for Engineering Education) may provide further opportunities to interact with existing research and literature on learning and teaching to illuminate our experiences or catalyze fresh new ideas, as well as provide new insights we can use to reflect on our own teaching.
    • Technology that supports this: Google search, online journal databases

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