At the end of the year, it’s easy to think of all that still needs to be accomplished, and all that wasn’t accomplished. It’s the nature of teachers to focus on the work. But it’s this time of year that I like to compare my student survey results.
Our school has a panel of student leaders that advocated to give teachers feedback twice a year this time – to allow us to learn and grow through feedback from our students. As I wrote about previously, I like to share my results with the kids, but I’m careful how I display the data.
When I’m ordinal categorical data (data which has responses that are ordered like disagree-neutral-agree), my preferred visualization is a shifted & stacked horizontal bar chart. Here is mine for my second semester student responses:
Comparing that to my first semester…
And a few takeaways are clear:
- In general, my bars shifted to the right
- My disagrees and strongly disagrees disappeared
- My Neutrals increased in the question about appropriate challenge levels
- My strongly agrees decreased in a few areas
Again, I won’t share this bar graph with the students because I don’t want them to compare me to other teachers and I don’t want the students who “disagree” to think their small report size doesn’t matter, but I will share my progress and tell them some goals I have for next year.
It’s always important to me that I model how to receive feedback and demonstrate a growth mindset to my students – and this is a great time of year to use this activity to close out with students.