I’ve always been a fan of giving anonymous surveys to students at the end of the school year.
An anonymous survey is your chance to ask students the questions you may have been asking yourself all year: Does everyone in your class feel respected? Was there something they wished you’d noticed? Is that joke you tell every morning really as funny as you think it is?
Honest answers to these questions can save you from repeating mistakes.
That being said…
Teachers are often encouraged to ask students for feedback about their teaching as if this is unquestionably good advice in every situation. And it’s definitely not that.
I’ve spent nearly two decades having confidential conversations with teachers in various formats. During that time I’ve heard numerous stories in which teachers asked students for feedback and ended up feeling utterly flattened by the experience.
It’s all made me wish there was less of a cheerleader approach to this and more of a tread-carefully approach.
There are few situations in non-teaching life where you would ask for this many opinions about something that feels so important and personal. With that in mind, there are better and worse ways and times to do it, as well as better and worse reasons for doing so.
Here are some guidelines—and a few words of caution—for any teacher about to ask a room full of students for their unvarnished opinions.
In some ways, teaching is a position of power. In other ways, it’s a position of vulnerability.
One of the big arguments for collecting student feedback is that it empowers students. And what kind of teacher wouldn’t want to empower students? The answer is. . . maybe you. At least not right this second. In fact, a less morally-loaded way of asking this question would be: is this a good moment to shift the balance of power away from the person who is often standing alone at the front of the room? It’s okay if the answer is no.
Teaching can certainly be a position of great power and thus responsibility. But teachers also spend much of their time outnumbered and in public speaking situations. In these ways, teaching is almost like a less funny version of standup comedy. And no one tells a standup comic to go onstage and say, “Please, everyone, share your thoughts on how I’m doing up here. All at once, if possible!”
Consider your reasons for asking.
Before you decide to solicit feedback from your students, take the time to think through what you’re hoping to find out and make sure this is the right tool for the job.
Are you feeling the due date blues on a major class project? A survey to gather students’ responses to the project might tell you something useful about how to improve it–but if nobody turned in the project, you might be giving students an incentive to unload on you with negative comments, hoping you’ll decide not to record the grade.
Do you feel that you’ve totally lost your students a month into the school year, and you’re desperately searching for something to reignite their interest as part of a desperate mid-year classroom management makeover? That’s probably not a realistic outcome for any survey.
Giving constructive feedback is a skill. The average K-12 student has not had much practice at this skill.
Bosses who are required to give feedback to their employees often receive extensive training on how to do this. Your students have not attended these trainings.
This means that while you’ll likely get some useful feedback, you’ll also get plenty of comments that aren’t particularly helpful. This isn’t enough of a downside to make surveys a universally bad idea. However, it does mean you’ll want to take steps up front to make this feedback manageable and usable.
Do your best to ask questions that will lead to the level of detail you want. And mentally prepare yourself to get a few answers that seem off-topic, jokey, unrealistic, hostile, or just hard to interpret.
Remember that one comment can mess with your head. And you’re asking for a lot more than one comment.
This is coming from someone who once left my students’ end-of-year surveys on my kitchen table, unopened, for a full week. This was after years of confident teaching, and in spite of the fact that I expected mostly positive feedback. It just took me that many full nights of sleep to work up the courage to read whatever these kids might have to say.
Teaching is a relationship-based job in which even the professional parts are intensely personal.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by a tidal wave of opinions, especially if there might be hurtful comments mixed in. Sure, there will probably be positive reviews, too. But are you really going to remember those?
Your students deserve privacy, confidentiality, and dignity. So do you.
In order for the feedback process to be effective, students need to know their answers won’t be held against them at grading time. One way to reassure them of this, especially with end-of-year surveys, is to have students fold their anonymous surveys in half as they finish and place them in a manila folder. Then, in front of everyone, you or a trusted classmate should staple around the edges of that folder and promise that you will not open those staples until the last grade has been submitted. And, when you say it, mean it.
As a related courtesy, you should also ask that students not show one another their survey answers while working.
Explain that it will really mess with your head if students are discussing their answers in front of you, knowing you can’t see them for days or weeks. (And, when you say that, I guarantee you’ll also mean it.)
Absorbing feedback takes time.
If you can’t wait until the end of the year to give out a survey, at least wait until Friday. And for the love of all that is holy, do not sit down and read a stack of surveys at your desk while students are present!
Plan a time to open them in private, when you have a few days without classes to absorb the advice and recover from any bad reviews. And before you conduct any survey, make sure you’re not putting yourself in a position where you’ll need to implement changes right away based on the results. You’ll need time to think about how to put all that feedback to good use.
Feedback is often great for alerting you to a problem, but less great at pointing you toward a solution.
The best way to use student evaluations is to consider them as a whole, not react to specific answers in the moment.
While it’s likely there will be a comment or two that sticks with you in ways you hadn’t expected, no one student’s answer is going to be the key that unlocks a problem.
It’s not even necessarily likely to reflect the views of many other students. Try to find ways to objectively search for patterns in the responses you’re getting.
And now, if all the warnings above haven’t scared you off. . .
. . . Here are my favorite 11-questions to ask on an end-of-year student survey.