Asking Students What They Would Do If They Were The Teacher

one of my favorite practices we've normed in our classroom

“Technically, I'm doing really well right now as a student overall grade-wise. However, I'm beginning to feel really burnt out and overwhelmed with all of my classes.” —student reflection from a recent check-in survey

One of my favorite new systems this year is actually one of Jim’s systems: regular check-in’s via informal exit tickets to see how things are going in our classroom as well as overall in the school from the vantage point of students via three questions:

1. How is our class going on a 1-7 scale, 7 being the best?

2. How is school going overall for you?

3. [optional] Is there anything Mr. Luther needs to know to better support you as a student?

Almost a year into using this system, I could not recommend it more.

Embedding these questions into our classroom regularly allows me to get great individual feedback from students about how they are doing and what they need in terms of support—and it also gives me a chance to capture the pulse of the classroom and the school overall across the entirety of the school year.

Which is what led to this week’s check-in and the “red flag” result that jumped off the page once I compiled all the results:

Though it had been a bit since our previous check-in, the major drop in how students were doing overall was staggering—yet also very much tracked with the “vibe” of the classroom of late: students still feel pretty good about what we’re doing, but overall are exhausted and stressed, each in their own way but collectively as well.

My plan on Monday, then?

To share these results with the entire classroom followed by a simple question:

“If you were the teacher and you saw this feedback, what would you think and, more importantly, what would you do?”

And then I’ll listen to what they have to say.

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Step 1: Surveys → Step 2: Discussions

In order to shift the classroom community towards having these types of “What Would You Do As The Teacher?” conversations more frequently in recent years, I’ve started looking for as many opportunities as possible to ask targeted survey questions within the work we are already doing. In this way, the survey is not separate from the learning experience; rather, as I discussed with

Sara Candela

on The Optimist podcast recently, the reflection gets authentically centered within our work.

For example, early in the school year I like to ask students how they feel about the pace of our course with questions like this at the end of unit assessments:

Step 1, then: finding more opportunities for targeted survey questions across the learning opportunities in your classroom.

That said, this type of cultural shift in the classroom isn’t really about the “survey questions” themselves as much as it is about what we do with them as teachers.

A lot of us teachers already use them frequently, after all—especially with all the new tech tools available to gather results efficiently and creatively.

Reflecting back on my own classroom over the years, though, too often the collecting of the feedback became a dead end as far as how students experienced this: they gave their results and then those results disappeared into the digital ether, in their eyes.

The takeaway? Their voices weren’t valued.

How I try to remedy this, then, is with Step 2: as quickly as possibly sharing the collective results back to students and—most importantly—asking them what they would do if they were the teacher and received this feedback from students.

Here is an example of what turning around the feedback from the survey question above has looked like:

Students discuss this as a group and then each group comes up with one “takeaway” or suggestion to share aloud to the rest of the class while I take notes on my clipboard.

Do they typically come to any form of consensus? Of course not. These questions are hard and making the classroom work for all the different students in it is a perpetually-confounding task.

Only now the students are part of that task—and I believe that is a good thing.

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Framing Humility, Centering Student Voice

Just like almost all teaching strategies, however, it is not as simple as a change in practice but more so one of design and mindset.

Really, I believe that any type of shift in practice like this necessitates two deeper shifts as a teacher:

1. Committing to transparency and humility with students about how sometimes we have to make choices as teachers that we are conflicted about, and that there are no perfect answers to the difficult choices. (And there are lots of difficult choices.)

2. Creating time and space for student voice to be centered authentically in a way they can see and feel—which means allocating and protecting time for these type of reflections and discussions, yes, and making the priority visible.

Without these deeper shifts, I don’t think the shift in practice would have made much of an impact in my classroom.

Here’s one example of what these “deeper shifts” ended up looking like recently in our classroom: we had just finished a lengthy writing process after reading King Lear and moving through a multi-stage synthesis essay, with students completing a series of reflections on their writing process as part of their final submission.

The reflections were incredibly thoughtful—and not all positive! So instead of me grappling with the different viewpoints and reflections of students on my own in an empty classroom, I copy/pasted ten different reflections and created a “reflection feedback gallery walk” for students to move through the next lesson.

And that’s exactly what they ended up doing, quite literally! They read all these reflections via the gallery walk while adding their initials to any that resonated with them (see image above)—followed by debriefing in small groups about what stood out to them from the reflections of their peers.

Why I really loved this activity: [1] it literally centered the voices of students in our classroom; [2] it made transparent the variety of viewpoints and experiences in a given classroom community; and [3] it affirmed what many students were feeling while also offering a window into feelings they did not experience themselves.

But what then, you might ask?

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A Really Cool, Authentic Feedback Loop

Following the gallery walk and debriefing, we ended our conversation in that lesson with three solutions I was considering for next year as a result of all the feedback I had received.

Once again, this meant giving students time to discuss amongst themselves in order to arrive at a “consensus vote” in their small groups, after which I tallied the results in front of the class and asked a few follow-up questions.

So why did I love this so much as a culminating sequence to our conversation?

First of all, it helped model how feedback ultimately needs to be constructive and, ultimately, this means making choices. Despite the fact that there was no clear verdict from any of the classes—they were split across the three options for this particular vote!—they got to see and experience different perspectives across the classroom and how challenging it is to arrive at a solution that works for and responds to everyone in any community.

This wasn’t a “gotcha” activity, either.

In my eyes, the intention was more of an invitation: “come on in and see what this is like,” I kept thinking, “so that we can work towards a solution together.”

More than that, however, this culminating activity also gave me a chance to point to solutions from these same feedback conversations from the previous school year (see image above) and in doing so to emphasize the substantive way their constructive feedback can make an impact going forward.

Yes, this definitely comes across as a bit utopian even as I type this, but it happened—which is why I wanted to write about it!

My vision of the ideal classroom is one in which students are consistently, authentically and generously offering feedback in order to pay forward their own perspectives to make the classroom better for students in the years ahead—just as their classroom is better as a result of the authenticity and generosity of feedback from prior years.

Too ambitious?

Perhaps.

But regardless I think it starts with taking the feedback students have given you as a teacher, returning it to them with transparency and humility, and then asking that all-important question: “what would you do if you were the teacher?”

You never know what you might learn.

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Some additional Broken Copier footnotes

• First, both Jim and I just wanted to once again express our gratitude as The Broken Copier podcast has officially hit 10,000 downloads! Quite a thing to go from two teachers just chatting and recording their conversations to where we are now—and that is 100% a result of this incredible community that continues to grow here. So much gratitude to all of you listening and reading our work!

• Speaking of that work, we’ve shared out recently about our goal of bringing more teacher voices onto the podcast—including this form for those interested in sharing their own classroom experiences with us. So many have reached out already via the form, so first and foremost, thank you to those who have responded! We are working through these responses along with our schedules to figure out a calendar to reach out in the near future and start setting up these conversations—so keep an eye out for a response soon! (And if you’re still interested, check out the form!)

• As far as sharing my own work, I was able to publish a piece with Edutopia about one of my favorite activities this school year: collaborative slide decks and how they can fuse critical thinking with authentic discussion and teamwork in the classroom. Feel free to check it out!

• Two other pieces I loved the past week:

  Andrew Campbell
  ’s English Teacher Weekly post, especially the section on Robert Frost, and
  Adrian Neibauer
  ’s “Poetry Masterclass” post on his Substack. Both resonated with me in different, important ways—and I highly recommend giving them a look!

• Lastly, Broken Copier posts could be a bit more sporadic in the next couple months as both Jim and I navigate the end of our school years. Lots of fodder to write about and discuss in the chaotic culminations of a given school year, yes, but very little time to do that writing and discussing. We’ll do our best—but this is called the Broken Copier for a reason, right? Sometimes all you can do is wait for that next technician visit…

Take care and have a great weekend! —Marcus