Please check your ego at the door; UDL and student feedback

Have you ever had that student who walks through the door and is so petrified of making a mistake because they don't want to look stupid?  I mean, we all went through middle school, so whether or not we have had that student, I'm sure at some point in our lives we were that student.  We somehow need to get those students to feel comfortable enough to take risks and to be able to make mistakes in front of their peers and not feel the need to immediately melt through the floor.  How do we do that?  Isn't that the million dollar question? 

   

Where'd he go?

I don't think that there is one correct answer. Clearly we need to build relationships with our students. Relationships with students in many ways are like a partnership. And partnerships work best when there is feedback coming from both directions.  I think that all too often we give and give and give feedback to students, but don't take enough time to listen to what they have to say about our performance.  And that feedback can be so valuable.  

                                       

However.  However! It can also be very difficult to take that risk...the same risk we ask our students to take every day.  We need to open ourselves up to the very students we critique on a regular basis.  That's scary!  All of a sudden we may feel like the student who is afraid to make a mistake.  All of a sudden we remember how vulnerable you can feel when your ego is on the line.  

It isn't comfortable, but I do think that it is necessary.  How can we know what students are thinking if we don't ask them?  How can we know what interests them if we don't ask them?  How can we know what works best for them if we don't ask them?  Students are more than willing to let us know what they think, and many will on the regular without a formal feedback survey - but not all of them will. A simple feedback survey is a great way to reach all students.  It also is a simple way to make all students feel like you care about what they think, which is a fabulous relationship builder.  

I didn't ask for student feedback for my first few years of teaching.  In hindsight I feel like I could have improved so much, made fewer mistakes, reached more students, if I had.  About 5 (maybe more?) years ago, I started handing out this  survey at the end of the school year.  I quickly learned that just having the students assign numbers to each bullet point wasn’t quite enough.  I would learn that I was doing poorly in a certain section, but didn't have the specifics of what I was doing wrong.  I needed better feedback. I had to ask students to explain any score that was below a 3 so I could improve.  The comments were usually helpful, and always insightful – whether to my teaching practice or to their learning styles and/or mental states.  However, I haven’t done my end-of-the-year survey before the end of the year, and I think it is a good idea to check in more formally a few times a year. Imagine being able to fix mistakes and reach more learners before it is too late and they are no longer in my class!  

                                       

In the short term, I am constantly asking students for feedback.  How did this approach work for you?  What do you think we could do better?  I ask the class at large and I do get some great responses.  I apply what they tell me to the next lessons.  I also started using exam wrappers this year.  That has not only helped me see what students are doing to prepare, but they also have taken it as opportunities to let me know what is working and what isn’t working in class.  So I have been able to take that feedback and (hopefully!) improve instruction. 

I have been really getting into UDL (Universal Design for Learning) instruction, and recently ran across a different kind of survey,  the ESE Model Student Feedback Survey and I really dug it.  I noticed that it asked questions that pertained to UDL - which my original survey did not.   So I decided to go through my old survey and the ESE form and create a new Google Form assessment that my students can use to assess me.  At the end are some open response questions that I borrowed from the article 3 Ways of Getting Student Feedback to Improve Your Teaching by Vicki Davis.  In the article, she suggests taking open responses and throwing them into a Wordle so that you can quickly see trends in the comments.  I love this idea and will most definitely be borrowing it!

Wordle

                                      

I have to say, in the past, I have had some really tough feedback to swallow.   I am the type of person who immediately goes to see what I am doing wrong, instead of basking in the warm feelings of what I am currently rocking.  I wouldn't say I'm a glutton for punishment, but I certainly always want to improve.  Normally, I  have had the whole summer to process the critique, to be able to separate the vitriol from the useful and let my ego settle down.  Doing feedback midyear will require that I check my ego at the door.  That is something that I started trying to do when I first started doing student surveys.  I found that I was usually pretty good at predicting where I was struggling before I even got the feedback from students, so I wasn't usually surprised at survey results. I can already see some areas of the new survey that I'm willing to bet I get low scores on...because I would score myself low on them right now.  It is easier to take negative feedback if you don't look at teaching as being about you...it's about the kids.  And what better way to learn what they need than to ask them?  

https://www.slideshare.net/LauraPasquini/facillitation-betrategies