11 Questions to Include in your End-of-Year Student Survey

An anonymous, end-of-year survey is your chance to ask students the questions you may have been asking yourself all year.

Below, you’ll find eleven questions I’ve found especially helpful in getting the type of feedback that I hoped to get from students.

But first, a warning…

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. 

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.

Here are my favorite 11 questions to include on an end-of-year student survey.

1. What was your favorite thing about this class?
2. What was your least favorite thing about this class?
3. How did your behavior, attendance, and effort in this class compare to what you did in other classes?
4. Do you feel you were treated with respect? Please describe any incident where you felt disrespected.
5. Do you feel you were recognized when you worked hard or did something well?
6. What could your teacher have done to help you learn better?
7. What could your teacher have done to make sure all the students in the classlearned better?
8. If you became a teacher, what would you do differently? What would you do the same way?
9. Did anything important happen this year that the teacher didn’t notice?
10. What will you remember most about this class?
11. Please write and answer one other question that should have been on this survey.

Then what?

Have students fold the surveys, half.

Have a trusted student helper collect the surveys in a folder.

Staple it closed.

Promise not to open it until school lets out and report cards are printed. (As a related courtesy, you should also ask that students not show one another their survey answers while working. Here are some additional dos and don’ts for collecting feedback from students.)

Remember: You’ll need both privacy and time to absorb all this feedback.

There are few situations in non-teaching life where you would ask for this many opinions about something that feels so important and personal. 

Every time I’ve opened the stapled edge of a manila folder full of surveys about my teaching, I’ve done so with a vaguely jello-y feeling in my stomach.

I knew that even if most of the survey answers were positive, the negative ones would land harder and last longer.

The good news? You won’t repeat the same mistakes for years without noticing.