Student Feedback

I think #observeme is a really cool thing. I’ve enjoyed following the hashtag and seeing great things happening in a ton of classrooms. My school is working to increase professional collaboration and observation, and I’ve had several colleagues visit my class so far this year. Thing is, I haven’t received much helpful feedback. I know I’m not alone with this challenge. Other teachers often say they weren’t there for long enough to give helpful feedback, or just never follow up.

I don’t mean to criticize #observeme. It’s powerful just to have other teachers in my classroom and get these conversations started. I’m excited that this is a priority for my school and we are working on common language and goals to focus these observations. I’m sure that over time I’ll receive more useful feedback from my peers. The goal of #observeme isn’t just to get me some useful feedback; it’s also to create a professional community that values observation and continual learning.

But if my goal is to get some useful feedback on my teaching that I can use to get a little better tomorrow, I think I’ve found a different way to do that. Here’s a survey I asked students to fill out via a Google Form:

It’s adapted from the ideas in Dylan Wiliam’s book Embedding Formative Assessment. I tried to make the language more accessible for students, and briefly framed what these ideas mean to clarify what I was looking for from students. The survey was anonymous, and only took students a few minutes. Here are a few of the responses I received:

Even though we have been given a sheet that tells us what we are being assessed on for synthesis tasks it can still be a bit confusing what precisely we are being assessed on for a specific synthesis task. Maybe this is a misunderstanding that I have but it would be helpful just to revisit that topic quickly again.

I think that it is really hard to give peer to peer feedback. Coming up with a strategy to help facilitate that would be something to look at. I want to know how these problem solving skills can help me in the future. So every one in a while just vocalizing what that looks like would be an area to improve on. I think also when giving feed back on synthesis tasks, it can be nice to have a very brief verbal explanation as well as what is written on the page.

I feel that even when we do collaborative work it still is very independent. I think finding a better way of holding students accountable for their group work is an area to improve on.

These are pretty insightful comments into my classroom, from the people who are likely to best understand what is happening. There were plenty more, affirming things I do well, reminding me of weaknesses I need to work on, and providing insights into areas of my teaching I hadn’t been thinking about. For a few minutes of my time mocking up this survey and a few minutes of their time filling it out, I’ve got a lot of great feedback to work with.