For many of you, especially in the southern U.S., this is coming a little too late, but some of you may still be in school and have a chance to do this.
If you haven’t thought about surveying your students, it’s a great way for you to get feedback on the one thing that really counts for long-term success with your students: what they really think about their language learning. This feedback can inform your planning for next year. In our case, it got us asking, what can we do to fix this problem:
And even better if you know the reasons why it came out like this:
Wow, you mean all that time I spend trying to show kids how useful my language is only speaks to a very small percentage and where I really need to be focusing is on why they hate it? That is some useful feedback!
What about the content itself? When we did this survey we had a new teacher coming in and it was very helpful to say, look, here’s what our 8th graders thought they could do last year and it seems we need some more practice on, for example,
I don’t have any such nice charts to show you results from our other surveys, but if I’d taken the time to graph them this way I bet I’d have gotten equally useful feedback. If you’d like to survey your students on why they’re in class or not and what they think they can do, here are the surveys I designed:
- Survey students going into Spanish 1 (for us, 8th grade)
- Survey students exiting required classes and potentially electing a higher level (for us, 10th grade)
- Survey students exiting one higher level with potential to elect a higher one
Ready to chart your feedback and help other teachers see what students really think? How about guest-posting your survey results on Musicuentos?
[…] hard about next year, this was a good time to give them a little survey. I borrowed heavily from Sara-Elizabeth’s ideas from last spring, with a little adaptation to make it fit my students and what I wanted to learn […]