How Should You Collect Honest Feedback From the Students?
Feedback is necessary for improving anything; behavior, work, talking style, and much more. Whether it is something personal or professional, feedback allows you to see and understand everything from someone else’s perspective. It also allows you to get a dialogue of the way you are seeing and visualizing something.
The questions and someone else’s views can help you understand where you lack, and you have the opportunity to do something about it. Feedback does the job of identifying the problem for you, and then you can work on improvising the problem. This is why teachers are encouraged to take feedback from students.
Doing this allows the teachers to understand their students, how they learn, and if they are even learning or not. Every student has their own style of learning, and everyone learns at their own pace as well. As a teacher, you can learn what makes them gain interest and what doesn’t, and you can then find a way of improving your teaching style for what suits them.
So how can you get good and effective feedback from them? How can you be more open about it and get the information you can analyze well? Don’t worry; we have the answers to all your questions. MTS is a well-known online tutoring platform with highly skilled and professional tutors on board. Therefore, we have the answers to all teacher and student-related problems. Below, we are sharing a few tips that you can use to collect valuable feedback from your students. Keep Reading; you won’t regret it!
1. Choose a day to inform students about when they will be coming into a class and give a feedback
It is better to inform your students beforehand that you will ask them for feedback before they come to the class. Doing this will help them come prepared and how they are going to give the feedback. Moreover, this will make it easier for you to handle all of them if you have a big class to maintain and if you want to have better reviewed and honest opinions from them.
2. Be proactive and tell the students why you want to collect it?
Be honest with them about why you need them to give you feedback? Tell them the importance of the feedback and what they will get from it? If you tell them the purpose and what is in it for them, they will act more promptly and give you honest feedback. After all, honest opinions are the only things that will be helpful and productive for you. So, make sure to encourage them to give honest and true feedback. Or else, they will give wrong or senseless feedback just for its sake.
3. Read out the instructions aloud to your class
Don’t just hand over the feedback paper (or whatever form you are planning to distribute) and leave them on their own. Instead, read out the instructions to the class, and tell them if there are any specific rules or regulations. This way, they will not feel the need to put in extra time to read through the instructions vigorously, and you can clear their questions and confusion on the spot. When they know how to fill out the questionnaire, they can actively provide you with the information. Also, that information will be honest, true, and productive.
4. Be open for constructive feedback
If you want your students to be honest with you, you need to assure them that you will take the feedback positively. You won’t feel bad about it; instead, you will take the feedback positively and will try to improve all the points where you lack. If there is a problem with your teaching style, you will try to improve that too. If there is a problem in how to conduct tests and assign assignments, try to figure out the problem point and try to do the needful.
How can you get feedback with so little time?
You can get beneficial feedback even if you do not have time on your hand. Yes, you can arrange an activity that will take the least little of your time. Want to know how? Again, we are here to the rescue! Below, we are sharing some useful tips to make your feedback process short, simple, and easy to evaluate. These tips can make you improve and organize faster than possible if done with consistency and planning.
Now, let us take a look at those tips without making you wait any further!
1. Observation and later reflection
After they have given you the results, observe the changes in you and also the class. Do it daily. Understand that the information they have given you is vital, and you are putting in the effort for you to become a better teacher and make them learn. Feedback will also tell you about them and how they like to study and reason concepts. Reflect on yourself daily after classes to see whether you are improving and whether the result of class is also improving or not?
2. Combine multiple ways of containing feedback
Combine different ways of taking in the feedback; you can hand out forms, ask them individually, or ask them when they come to you to submit an application. You can also use multiple class assessment techniques. Feedback is given better when the person giving the feedback has his identity kept private. They feel safe to say what they want to say when you don’t know them. This is because people fear hurting or making you angry. You can make an assessment scale for yourself and even make feedback bimonthly. When you take their tests, you can see it from their performance. If you see that it isn’t good, you can ask them about where they didn’t understand and how you can make the topic easier.
3. Make simple questionnaires
Making questionnaires that are to the point and have fewer questions is easy to fill. Knowing that you don’t have to spend more than 10–15 minutes on something makes the average person happier, and they will eventually give honest feedback in a very good mood. Also, people tend to finish smaller feedback forms faster. Ask them open-ended questions mostly. You can collect qualitative data this way. Qualitative data can help you get to know the “why” behind the reason they are giving. However, please do not ask them more than ten to twelve questions per form — if you really want honest and productive feedback. Keeping the forms short also allows you to analyze them with much ease. You can develop a better conclusion and plan from a simpler form and get the most beneficial data from them.
Conclusion
Feedback is the primary factor when it comes to improving your teaching skills. Therefore, it is essential to encourage your students to give you honest feedback without any fear. Just follow the tips we mentioned above, be honest with your students, tell them the importance of the feedback, and allow them to keep their identities discreet. Also, keep in mind that it is constructive feedback, and you should always take it in a positive way instead of being negative and disheartened.
