What? Another
proforma asking students to reflect on their learning? Convenient … yes, but is
there any real thinking involved? Depends what you do with it and the reasons
for giving it!
If you hand out
the surveys, get them back and don’t do anything with it, then what was the
point, but if you use the information for something, then absolutely ... there is a purposeful use.
A survey is
just one tool in a teaching toolbox, you can follow up what you find with
one-on-one questioning with individual students, particularly if a student believes
they understand content, but their work displays a conflicting outcome. A
survey is just one of the tools in your toolbox, but can give you some useful
results.
I first used
this survey during a Science and Technology unit of work that I was delivering
to a multi-stage (Year 3-6) class because I wanted them to be active
participants in their learning and also evaluate if whether what I, as the
teacher, was delivering was interesting to them. There was also gifted and
talented students in this class as well a wide disparity between literacy
skills due to the multi-stage scenario. It was a real juggling act within the
group setting to extend some students and not lose others with content that was
too in-depth and intricate for their level of understanding. Were they still
with me? Was I boring them to tears? This is what I wanted them to tell me!
Get your free copy of my survey tool here!
As a straight
statistical analysis of the data, I plugged it into a spreadsheet and out came my
results visually!
Survey responses received from my students. |
Although the
survey was anonymous, often you can tell by the handwriting who owns it, and I
pulled some of the kids aside for a one-on-one oral reflection. During this
reflection, I wanted to get them to justify the thinking behind the choices
they made so I asked them questions about their answers.
Asking open ended questions aids critical thinking. |
If this
reflection tool was a straight tick a box survey, I don’t think it would achieve
much, but because it also contains an open ended question, students have the
opportunity to tell a teacher about what they learnt.
For example, I used this survey during a unit on poetry for
Year 5. After looking at a range of idioms, the task was to include an idiom in
the poetry piece they were working on. What this returned survey told me was
that this student:
- enjoyed how the content was presented and their task (my teaching was good!)
- believed they knew what an idiom was
- was confused about how to include an idiom in their poetry task (if you know who the student is you can target this area, or if it was a common response, this provides you with a target for future lessons).
A returned student survey. |
Responses on
surveys aren’t everything as students could be replying based on what they
think you want them to say, but as a tool in teaching students to learn to become
critical thinkers, they are helpful.
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