The role of the member of staff leading the meeting is to compile a summary of such views, to validate them at the meeting, and, later, to produce a short report of the main outcomes. The structured group interview allows students to have greater freedom of expression than a questionnaire, and more opportunity to make constructive suggestions for improvement. It typically requires a meeting of about an hour, but the processing is done during that hour and the time needed for producing a report is short. It is good practice for a group interview to be led by an experienced leader who is not involved in the delivery of the educational provision that is being evaluated, and preferable not in the same department. The SDU can provide guidance on the operation of structured group interviews, and members of SDU have experience of leading and reporting such meetings.
Every academic department has a staff-student liaison committee.
It is good practice for every meeting of a liaison committee to include a default agenda item on evaluation of teaching, so that it is a legitimate topic to raise at any meeting. The degree of harmony between the staff responses and the outcomes of the students' evaluation is a good indicator of staff awareness of student perceptions. Items of disharmony suggest that staff understanding of students' needs and concerns needs to be addressed before attending to issues of detail that arise from the evaluation. Peer evaluation, by external examiners, to support self-evaluation of teaching in relation to the maintenance of academic standards is a familiar and routine activity. A colleague, focusing on the process that is taking place, adds a dimension of evaluation that may escape the member of staff and the students, who are generally too busy with the business of teaching and learning to observe the process itself.