The marmite experience

I've now finished my teaching for this module (apart from the assessment session around Easter), and gathered some written feedback from the students at the end of my last session. There's a ranking scale of 1-4, with 1 being poor, and 4 being excellent. Normally I receive 3s and 4s, but there were quite a few 1s and 2s this time. I'm trying not to take it personally, as the comments show the students either really enjoy the group work, or they hate it, so these extremes of feeling are reflected in their opinion of the session. Despite the majority (fortunately) rating the session as good or excellent, quite a few commented on the size of the class and would prefer to learn in groups, but as part of a smaller class. I felt happy at the end of my last workshop as every group made progress with the task, and not one resorted to searching Google instead of the prescribed databases. In fact, far more had a go at searching Academic Search Complete than students in previous years, so this was a positive result for them and for me.