Surveys

I decided to survey my Transition Math classes since there is such a variation between the two all-senior classes. I used a variety of types of survey questions as well as a broad area of topics since I did not have a topic that I was really individually interested in. Through this survey I found out that my students are aware of what kind of grade they have in my class and they all believe that I care about how well they do. I was happy that the students could see how much I cared about their success. One question I asked the students was where the school could be improved. A lot of the students wanted to see more color in the hallway. They wanted to organize volunteers to help make the school "prettier". It turns out that the thing that makes it hardest for students to learn is other students. So with these results, I am going to try to come up with ways students can work to help each other more than hinder each other's learning. I also want to help the students make this school feel like their own and not just some place they have to come every day. :)

Student Voice - Survey

I chose to do the help/hinder survey with my Applied Geometry students. It took a little time to organize the information and figure out what they were trying to tell me. The positive about this survey is that it was quick and easy to present to the students. However, I can now see I need to go further with the survey. This type of survey produced one word answers from the students, but not a lot of depth. I am planning on taking some of their likes and dislikes and generating a more detailed and probing survey. Stay tuned!!

Final Product After Student Voice Survey

As April explain in the previous post, we have but a great deal of emphasis on student voice in our classroom. Then, based upon the wants of our students we restructured our delivery of instruction. The results were amazing final products! How creative our students can be with simple cardboard! They were so proud of their work that they called the newspaper themselves and asked them to come and do a story on their projects!

Student Voice Surveys

This was an extremely eye-opening experience for me. Joetta and I had spoken to Matt Anderson about the toll all of the grant work and the school transition had been on our own classrooms, and he sympathized but agreed the results would be worth it; however, I didn't realize the real impact it has had. What I perceived as my learning environment and what I "heard" from the students in their surveys was quite different. I chose a survey about the class and teacher that had 2o questions with 3 choices, yes, sometimes, and no. It also had 3 open-ended questions. I then used one of the books suggestions, and on the back of the survey I asked them to list 4 things that helped them learn, and 4 things that hindered learning. I have looked at these surveys over and over and have learned much that will help me incorportate student voice to make my classroom more enjoyable. In the future I hope to display the responses graphically and elicit more specific responses from the students about each question.