The survey says.....
Okay, so I'm not sure if it is okay to be blogging about this yet, but I was dying to see what the kids wrote on the end of the year survey for 21st Century. I'm not sure why I was anxious, I just wanted to read and start internalizing some of their feed back. So far, I have only surveyed my year 1 class (mostly freshman) and my year 4 class (an exact mix of senior and juniors). I felt like I wanted to hear from some other people who have read their surveys or read them from last year and get some other thoughts, opinions, and feedback.
I feel a littel disappointed from reading them. It is not that the students gave negative feedback about me or the class; however, I just feel like I don't really know what to think about some of their answers. For every student who said technology didn't help them, there was a student who said it did. For every student who said the class was to "easy", there was a student who said it was too "hard". For every kid who said they liked a certain activity, there was a kid who said they hated it. So where do I go from here???????
All I can think right now is "You can't please all of the students all of the time!" I guess I thought I would get more of an idea of how to improve myself.
(But don't get me wrong there was one little ah, ha's for me, but there were a TON of contradictions that made me a bit frustrated)
posted by bkitch @ 7:51 AM
2 Comments:
Surveys are a tricky thing, but folks last year felt by the time we were done de-briefing them, that they were valuable.
Here's my take. First, you hope to get just a few comments that really make you think - probably the "aha" comment you mentioned qualifies as one of those. If you get even one or two of those, then I think it's worth it - it helps inform and improve your future teaching.
Second, I think you try to glean trends from the results. Yes, they will be contradictory (although sometimes that's due to the questions not being written well enough or perhaps the kids not being prepped well enough). Yes, you need to keep in mind that these are 14-18 year olds who have their own unique perspective and may or may not be ready to give the kind of feedback we need (especially about grading/assessment, since they are so sucked into the current system that it's hard for them to think about it dispassionately, all they think about is their grade at the moment and whether it's good or not.)
But even with all that, I think you can sometimes tease trends from the data. You try to read though the results and mentally "reject" (for lack of a better word) some of them based on tone or word choice, and then sometimes a clear trend or two comes through. Even if it's not clear enough to act on, it might be clear enough to then have conversations with your students at the beginning of next school year about those ideas and see if you can further clarify the trend.
Finally, I think there are two other purposes to the survey. First, it sends a message to the students that their opinion matters. That if they take the time to give us feedback we will honestly and carefully consider it and then possibly make changes if it makes sense to us. I think that's a very important - and necessary - message to send.
Second, the questions we ask on the survey help the students to start asking those - or similar - questions of themselves. It encourages many of them to start thinking more deeply about these issues, and then to be a more active participant in the learning process here at AHS. Especially when combined with the idea that their opinion matters, this can be very powerful. It's just another piece of the transparency that I think is so important to help us all move forward. When teachers and students (and ultimately parents and community) are involved in this conversation, it will help us better define what our school should look like, and what a 21st century education should look like.
I felt the exact same way, Barb. I finished and thought well, the only moral I can take from this story is to vary my instruction because for every kid that liked a book, others hated it; for every kid that like a project, others hated it, etc.
Like Karl said, after filtering out the "schools sucks" kids, I extracted some valuable information from it, but most importantly I made a statement to my students that I, like them, am a work in progress. I am trying to improve my instruction so it best suits their needs. Ultimately, it seems that statement is more valuable when considering the philosophical changes we are trying to evoke than any of their feedback is.
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