Help Your Students Help You

At the Modern Classrooms Project, we believe deeply in teacher mentorship.  Our virtual mentorship programs, our Facebook Group, and our open PLC resources are all designed to help teachers share best practices and learn from each others' experiences.

Peer mentorship is amazing.  But at the end of the day, it isn't fellow teachers you're trying to empower -- it's your students!  Their ideas and critiques matter too.  Here are a few ways that you can get student feedback on your use of Modern Classroom practices... and, more importantly, use that feedback to better meet your students' needs:

A) Share a 3-question survey.  When we survey students, we always ask: (1) What do you like about this class?  (2) What would you change?  (3) Is there anything else you'd like to share?  These are simple questions, and easy to put into a Google Form, but their results can be profound.

B) Host a focus group.  Ask some of your students to join you (virtually or socially distanced at school) during lunch, or after class ends, to discuss how they want to learn.  (If you're in person, of course, bringing a few snacks can help.)  It's a nice way to connect with students, and my guess is that they'll appreciate being invited!

C) Take student complaints seriously.  I used to prevent students from skipping ahead in videos.  My students hated this.  I worried that if they skipped around they'd miss content, but they reminded me that they had to pass each end-of-lesson mastery check anyways.  So I relented... and my students started moving faster without sacrificing understanding.  In this case, they knew better than I did what they needed.

Taking feedback from students isn't always easy -- it requires commitment and humility.  But in my experience, it has always been worth it.