M3: Apply to your course

As you are at the end of your course, we recommend you now prepare your wrap-up communications to share with students. For both messages, consider the information you are trying to convey.

Two weeks before the end of the term, send a message to encourage your students to complete the SEI.
At the end of the class, send a final message to wrap-up the class.

To help get you started, sample messages are included below.

SEI message to students

Example 1

I hope that you will be able to find about 15 minutes to complete the Student Experience of Instruction class evaluation survey. I will use your anonymous feedback to guide changes for future courses. Whether your feelings about the course are positive, negative, or mixed, please respond to the survey.

Example 2

One sure sign that the end of the semester is upon us is that the Student Experience of Instruction (SEI) class evaluation survey opens tomorrow. The SEI is anonymous, so you should feel confident in voicing your honest opinions about this class (good, bad and indifferent!). Yes, you link to it from the Canvas main menu, but it's stored on a different server. We don't get the results until the class is over. Many students seem apprehensive (usually only in the case of an impending negative review) that it could somehow influence their grade in the course. This is impossible because your grades will be long-since submitted before I ever see the results. And, those results are aggregated into one big report for the entire class.

Your input on the survey matters! Really! We try very hard to make sure our students are having meaningful and pleasant experiences in each course they take. This feedback mechanism is your way to let us know what we're doing right and what we could be doing better. I've often tweaked the structure of assignments or presentation of material based on feedback I've gotten from the SEI. I hope you'll take some time to give thoughtful and specific answers, especially to the open-ended questions.

End-of-course message to students

Instructors Katie Lee Bunting and Catherine Backman sent the following emails to students at the end of the course.

Example 1

Course: OSOT 511 Fundamentals of Occupational Therapy: Theory, Conceptual Models and the Practice Process

Dear class of 2020,

It has been our pleasure to teach and learn with you over the last 3 1⁄2 months. Our objectives in this course included you understanding and critiquing the foundations of occupational therapy, to know and apply common conceptual and practice process models, to appreciate the complexity of professional reasoning of occupational therapists, and to begin to pull all these things together to address occupational issues as described in the written and video cases we worked on.

We hope that in achieving these objectives, you come away from this course with an enriched understanding of the beauty, complexity and value of our core domain of practice- occupation; the usefulness of occupational therapy conceptual models to keep occupation front and centre and remind us of our domain of practice; the need for robust practice process models that acknowledge both the occupational therapy and the client as we enable occupation; and the necessity of ongoing evaluation and appraisal of all these things for our profession to grow and achieve its vision of possibility through occupation.

We are grateful for your ongoing engagement in our class. Your thoughtful questions, creative insights, critical appraisals, and willingness to be vulnerable and courageous with each other as you developed (and continue to) your occupational therapy perspectives and ways of knowing added a depth and value to the class that we could not have created as your instructors alone. Here is a quote (as you know we love quotes!) that for us resonated with the development of your “individual sense of occupation”:

“For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

We wish you all the best on your placements (there are sure to be a few “a-ha” moments) and look forward to seeing you again later in the program.

Best,

Katie & Catherine

Example 2

Course: OSOT 553 Innovations in Occupation: Developing and Evaluating Occupational Therapy Programs

Dear Master of Occupational Therapy class of 2020,

I’m so lucky to have a course with you all at the beginning of your MOT education, and now again toward the end of your education. And I’m so grateful to work and learn with such inspiring, compassionate, bright, and resilient people. This job makes me a better person and I have you all to thank for that!

In OSOT 511, my meta learning objective for you all was to begin to develop a critical occupational perspective. And in OSOT 553, it was for you to apply this critical (shout out to Dr. Huot in OSOT 551) occupational perspective at a program level, and appreciate how you can affect change collaboratively as occupational therapists. I’m always blown away by the work that is done in this course; not only the brain power that you put into your projects, but the heart you put in as well. And that speaks to the outstanding people you all are - that to be occupational therapists means to always put your heart into your work.

Engaging with and learning in this program during a pandemic and a global reckoning with white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism has been and continues to be a lot. This global reckoning calls on us to use our critical perspectives, to continue to learn and unlearn, and to do the work so that we can realise a world where all races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, abilities, religions, all bodies, all people have the resources, the agency, and the freedom to be, do, become, and belong. The pandemic has shed a harsh light on how social inequities and oppression lead to health disparities with at times fatal outcomes. It has also shown how interconnected we all are; how by working together, by caring about and for each other, we are better for it.

I was reading the poem Tear it Down by Jack Gilbert earlier this week and I thought I’d share this excerpt with you.

We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into love. We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

Know that learning, unlearning, questioning, dismantling, and rebuilding, all with heart, are central to your work as occupational therapists.

Take good care and please keep in touch.

Katie Lee Bunting