Spotlight - September 21, 2022

Faculty feedback

Student feedback about courses and clerkships is critical for the MD Program and its instructors. The MD Program includes sessions for students on how to provide actionable, respectful, effective feedback.

Student feedback about courses and clerkships is compiled in a report that is reviewed by the Associate Dean, MD Program, the Assistant Dean, Curriculum, and each course/clerkship coordinator at an annual review meeting. The first few minutes of each review meeting includes student curriculum representatives who share their collected data from the class. Areas of concern in teaching such as teaching quality, student supervision, or mistreatment in clinical rotations may be raised by the Associate Dean, MD Program based on student evaluations and shared with the instructor,  their department chair, and/or the Associate Dean, Professionalism. Concerns about teaching quality may be remedied through peer review of teaching, coaching, monitoring, and periodic reassessment. 

Faculty members have direct access to student feedback through Teaching Evaluation Score (TES) reports that are available in MedSIS (as long as the instructor has evaluations from 3 or more evaluations). These reports are automatically sent to instructors when they are published at the end of a course (pre-clerkship) or the end of the academic year (clerkship). 

What’s new related to Feedback to Faculty? 

• University of Alberta has approved a new Teaching, Learning, and Evaluation Policy and related procedure that went into effect July, 2022 and emphasizes a multi-faceted approach to teaching evaluations.
• To ensure timely feedback to faculty, and with a new update to MedSIS, emails are now being automatically generated when new Teaching Evaluation Score (TES) reports are published for any instructor.
• Updates to Discovery Learning preceptor evaluations to include psychological safety / professionalism (Fall 2022)
• Establishment of integrated Program Evaluation Unit will result in new reporting processes (including mid-year clerkship reports; regular reporting of MedSIS alerts to Associate Dean, MD Program)
• Increased communication to Department Chairs about learning environment and underperforming teachers (e.g. Hot Spot Survey reporting, clerkship evaluation reports, etc.).