Center for Teaching and Learning


A Teaching Minute from the UVM Center for Teaching & Learning

Listen, reflect, adjust:  Easy ways to gather student feedback (with a little help from GenAI)

October 12, 2026

This week we're thinking about the practice of collecting mid-term feedback from students. According to the Critical Teaching Behaviors (CTB) Framework, instructors who reflect gather feedback to identify opportunities for growth and improvement of their teaching. 

In the last Teaching Minute, we explored student metacognition and the value of creating opportunities for students to pause and think about their own learning. This time, we're turning the tables: how can we invite students to reflect on their experience in our courses? What helps them learn, and what might make learning more difficult? 

Mid-term feedback doesn't need to be a full evaluation

When you think about gathering student feedback, you might imagine a long questionnaire. Boo! But a few well-chosen questions can tell us a lot. You can create a quick survey using Brightspace Surveys or Microsoft Forms.

Keep it low lift.

For best participation, you could ask students to fill out your anonymous survey online during the last ten minutes of class. Prefer paper? You can also ask students to drop their unsigned, handwritten responses in a box. Choose whichever approach works best for you and your students, but remember, if you use GenAI for analysis, be sure to remove any information that could identify students.

Ask 3 simple questions.

Some examples of what you can ask students are: 

  • What has helped you learn in this class so far?
  • What, if anything, has made learning more difficult? 
  • Do you have any suggestions to improve this class?

Or you might also try a “keep, change, question” format: 

  • Keep: What should I keep doing? 
  • Change: What could I do differently?  
  • Question: What questions or concerns do you still have?

Explore their responses with Copilot.

Student feedback offers us rich material for reflection. What patterns are emerging? What surprises us? What confirms something we’ve already noticed?

This is where a GenAI tool such as Copilot might help. Suppose you collect 30, 50, or 100 responses online. Obviously, reading them matters, and that may be enough. But if you have a large class, identifying the recurring themes can take considerable time. (And who has extra time?!!)

Copilot can be a good starting point for understanding the feedback. For example, you might ask:  

"Review these student responses and identify 3-5 recurring themes. For each theme, provide a summary and several representative examples. Also identify any areas where students seem to have conflicting experiences. Then suggest three small, actionable adjustments I could make to address concerns while maintaining what's working well."

Or 

"Here is the feedback from my mid-term student survey. Summarize the top 3 recurring strengths and top 3 recurring weaknesses and then suggest three small, actionable adjustments I could make to address concerns while maintaining what's working well." 

If the adjustments it suggests don't feel right to you, include a description of your teaching style or philosophy and ask AI to take that into account in its suggestions.

If the output is too long, ask it to make it more concise and use bullet points.

Then close the loop.

Perhaps the most important part of gathering feedback from students happens after you collect it. If you ask students to share their thoughts and then nothing changes, or you never tell them what happened, it might feel to them like their feedback fell into a void... just disappeared into an institutional ether...

Closing the loop doesn't mean making all the changes students suggest. It means letting them know that they've been heard and how you're responding. For instance, you might say:

  • "Here’s what I heard..."
  • "Here’s what I’m going to change..."
  • "Here’s what I’m going to keep..."
  • "Here’s something I can’t change, but I want you to understand why..."

Even a brief check-in with students can show them that their voices matter and that their feedback is part of your ongoing reflection and improvement.

Dig Deeper.

We'd love to hear your thoughts about this. (ctl@uvm.edu) 

Happy teaching!

Inés Berrizbeitia and Rainamei Luna

The Center for Teaching & Learning
ctl@uvm.edu
Book a consult with us
www.uvm.edu/ctl