Written by Sara Rzeszutek

Published as part of QILT News & Notes Spring 2026 Midterms

Mid-course surveys, which can be done in multiple formats, give your students an opportunity to let you know what’s working and what isn’t in your class. Consider getting student feedback while there’s time to make adjustments to your approaches. Doing so has multiple benefits:

• It demonstrates to students that their voices matter
• It lets students know that you care about what they value in their learning
• It allows you to course-correct to ensure learning is happening
• It offers you an opportunity to be transparent and authentic with students
• It fosters metacognitive development for students, offering an opportunity for them to reflect on their learning
• It gives you the opportunity to model collaborative leadership, power-sharing with students, and empathy

Check out our resource on mid-course surveys, complete with survey design suggestions and additional reading.

What do I do with the feedback?

First, prepare yourself for it. If things are going well, great! But it can be hard to hear that things aren’t going how you expected them to. Don’t fret: this is an opportunity to reflect on your course and help your students feel invested in what you’re doing. You might not be able to make every change students recommend, but you can try little things. As James Lang reminds us in Small Teaching, you don’t need to do a complete overhaul to make a big impact.

Small adjustments might be all you need, and they can gradually transform your classroom. When you make those changes, telling your students what you’re doing helps them see how their voices made an impact.

If students let you know that your course is lecture-heavy, try adding in small opportunities for active learning. If they are confused about assignments, take a step back and spend some time applying the principles of transparent design.

If they report that they’re not understanding the material, consider using Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) to get a better sense in the day to day of what they do and don’t grasp so that you can address gaps along the way.

If there is a widespread request for some kind of unreasonable change, you can discuss it with your students and explain why it won’t work. Students will appreciate your candor and your effort to respond to their ideas.

If you’re unsure about what to do, consider requesting a friendly classroom observation from us. We’ll spend time talking about what you are looking for and offer feedback that focuses on strategies to overcome the challenges you identify.

What do I do about contradictory student feedback?

This is a totally normal result. Students are humans and they like different things. In my own experience, I’ve had some students say there was too much active learning and other students say there was too much lecture. If there’s an even split, I take that as an indication that my balance is actually okay. Sometimes there’s an outlier. For instance, one semester in a class built around walking tours, most students loved the experience of learning on location and being outside of the classroom. One student, though, complained that there were “too many field trips.”

There was not a lot I could do to change the overall structure of the class, so I had to let that one slide. The course didn’t meet that student’s expectations, and sometimes that’s okay.

The most helpful kind of advice is when a student offers a usable suggestion that you can try out. In my case, in a mid-semester survey I asked students about the group activities we regularly did. Most students were neutral about it, but one student suggested that I assign different groups periodically, so that students would meet others in the class, rather than just the classmates who always sat near them.

Since my class had a larger group project, and students usually sat with their group mates, I hadn’t considered doing this before. But after reading this suggestion, it occurred to me that we know our students are more socially anxious and isolated than in previous generations, and they might need a bit of hand-holding to meet students who were sitting 20 feet away from them.

So, in the next opportunity for in-class group activities, I explained that the survey feedback suggested I mixed them up and assign new people to talk with, and that we were going to try it. The student who suggested it knew they were heard, and the discussions that resulted were a great change of pace from our classroom norm. In the remainder of the semester, I didn’t mix them up every time we did group activities, but I did every now and again, and I think the overall class experience improved as a result.

What if what I try doesn’t work?

It’s not the end of the world. We want our students to have an amazing experience in all of our courses, but the changes you make still might not pan out how you hope. Doing mid-course surveys, taking the feedback seriously, and talking to the students about what you’re trying and why all help students to feel like their voices matter.

Even the act of collecting feedback makes a difference and sends a signal to students that you care. Relationships matter deeply for student learning, and asking students for their opinions helps cultivate the kind of classroom communities in which our students and faculty can thrive together.