Using Student Feedback

Video Transcription

Hello, and thank you for joining me for using student feedback. By the end of today's tutorial, we will be able to answer the following essential questions. How can student feedback improve instruction? And what are some ways I can obtain student feedback?

So if you think about your career as a teacher, you probably are remembering that you're constantly and consistently receiving feedback. This might be from administrators in the form of formal evaluations where they come into your room, they observe you teaching, they give you feedback. This might be from your peers through less formal observations of your classroom. It might be from parents at parent-teacher conferences.

And all of this is valuable, but we sometimes overlook one group that can give us a lot of great feedback, and that is our students. Remember, that sometimes if you make a change your instruction, no matter how small it is, and that change is based on feedback that you receive from students, it can actually make a significant difference in the student learning that's taking place. Also, if you ask your students for feedback, it helps establish an environment of trust because they know that you want them to be successful.

We're going to go over a couple of different suggestions for using student feedback. The first suggestion is to get written feedback. You can get written feedback and a variety of ways. One way is to give students an index card and have them write everything down that went well in the unit or lesson. Also, make sure that they write down what didn't go well. And they can give you suggestions for changes that you could make to help them learn.

This allows students to remain anonymous when giving feedback, and with them being anonymous, you're more likely to receive feedback that's honest from the students. I teach English, so we write a lot of papers. One aspect of that is for them to reflect on the unit as a whole and give feedback on that. You can also use technology with the written feedback and have them fill out a Google Form.

Another suggestion is to do focus groups or individual interviews. This is especially good for younger students because when they're younger, written feedback might be more difficult for students to give or they might have limited vocabulary. So you might actually get more information from an oral interview.

When students are really little and in the early grades, you might get information that's based around I liked this, or I didn't like this. And while that's valuable, when you're choosing the sorts of learning experiences in your classroom, you also want to know what is going to motivate your students. And if they don't know how to communicate that to you, you may need to prompt them with some questions that you can ask during the interviews.

Another strategy is to use plus, minus, delta. And this just is a really quick way for students to identify what's going well and what's working as well as what isn't going well. And then it also gives them an opportunity to offer change or improvement strategies. A consensogram is another way for this teacher to gauge what the students know about the topic. It also allows the teacher to assess the student's comfort level with the content, or to learn about how the students feel about the content or about the way that the content is being delivered.

You might ask questions like, how strong do you feel your knowledge is about adding fractions with unlike denominators? Or you could have the students use a sticky note and rate their comfort level on a chart that they create. Much like written feedback, this is anonymous, so you're more likely to get honest feedback from the students. You can do this as a form of an exit ticket as well.

Issue bins is another popular way that teachers gather feedback from their students. Students can make notes about their ideas, they can write down questions, they can write about issues that they want to be addressed. And they just put it on a piece of paper and stick it in a bin that the teacher has in the classroom. This is a good way for them to document what they're thinking about, and they can write their name on it or they don't have to so it can be anonymous.

You can also use a class chart with issue bins or you can use issue bands individually. So you can have students create a bracketing sheet using a half sheet of paper with a bracket drawn on it. And then within that bracket, students put their question, idea, or issue. And they're doing this while they're still engaging in the learning activity. Then they can turn in that bracketed sheet that they created and stick it in the issue bin.

One piece of advice for feedback is make sure that you are requesting it frequently. Just like you like to receive your feedback consistently, you want to make sure that you're asking for it consistently, because this way you can measure the climate and see what the vibe is in your classroom. You can see how students are doing with the content, but also how they're doing emotionally, because, remember, it's about educating the whole child.

And remember also to only ask students about things that they can actually judge. So use this advice when carefully wording your questions. So you might ask a question such as do you fully understand what the teacher means when she asks about indirect characterization? That is something the student can judge, rather than asking them a question that's more open-ended.

So now let's talk about the different ways that you can reflect on feedback. The most important way to reflect on feedback is by asking yourself a series of questions. And these are just some examples. First, you can ask, if you were being graded by your students as a whole, what grade would you deserve? Next, what things can you change that would result in improved learning for your students? And lastly, how will you communicate to your students that you take their feedback seriously and are implementing some of their suggestions?

With those questions in mind, let's reflect on this lesson as a whole. Do you currently collect student feedback at all? Are you interested in collecting student feedback? Why or why not?

Today we discussed how student feedback can improve instruction. And we went over some ways that the teacher can obtain student feedback. Now it's your turn to apply what you've learned in this video.

The additional resources section will be super helpful. This section is designed to help you discover useful ways to apply what you've learned here. Each link includes a brief description so you can easily target the resource you want. Thank you for joining me today and happy teaching.