Do you ask your students to evaluate you? You should!
I took a self-coaching class with Karen Rowan from Fluency Fast earlier this year. She told us that in addition to keeping track of the number of questions we ask in each class and the amount of time we spend in the target language, we should also be regularly asking our students to evaluate our class. Karen provided a daily evaluation sheet, which you can get by purchasing her Guide to Self-Coaching here. (I highly recommend going through this process – I learned quite a bit about myself and ways to immediately improve my instruction).
Why Student Evaluations are Important
1. Course evaluations give students a voice.
Students can respond anonymously. This gives them the power to inform you of issues you may not be aware of in class (another student’s behaviour is prohibiting them from acquiring language, for example).
2. Used correctly, evaluations build classroom community.
If you use the evaluations to reflect and improve your teaching, students notice. The more they notice you caring about how they feel about your class, the more involved they become. The more involved your students are in class, the more language they acquire. Win-win!
3. Evaluations provide students the opportunity to self-reflect.
A question or two that require students to reflect on their own performance provide the needed tools to recognize and change certain behaviors. Knowing that one is in charge of one’s learning process is very empowering. A question on Karen’s form asks students to gauge the grade they should receive for that day’s class. Surprisingly, students are pretty honest on this question! A few think they deserve much higher grades than their actual participation showed, but overall, students will mark their grade as much lower than you would.
4. Changing your teaching as a result of honest feedback makes you a MUCH better teacher.
I have presented at many conferences this. In every one, I have made the following statements:
“Slow and steady wins the race. If you think you are going slow enough for students to process your words, slow down. If you think THAT is slow enough, slow down even more. And when you finally think you are going slow enough, SLOW DOWN EVEN MORE. Language acquirers really do need that much time to process what you are saying.”
That is the number one thing attendees comment on; they just didn’t realize how much time it takes to process the second language.
Guess what? On their final course evaluation this year, one student actually told me that
she wished I would slow down because sometimes it takes her longer to process what I’m saying. I wish I had known sooner – apparently
I need to practice what I preach! Had I not handed out that evaluation, I would have never known and I wouldn’t be able to be a better teacher when I come back in the fall.
*By the way, “slow” looks differently in each level and even in each class. You will get a feel for what each class needs based on their ability to answer questions or how well they do on daily quizzes.*
5. Regular evaluations reinforce course and behavior expectations
In addition to very regular (in some classes, this mean daily) oral reminders of how you expect students to behave, a class evaluation is a different way to remind students what they need to do to meet your expectations.
What evaluations are NOT
I do not advise quitting sound, research-based practices because students complain. Let’s face it, kids whine! And some are going to dislike everything about your class simply because they are disgruntled teenagers who want to be entertained every moment of the day. I have found, however, that once they understand that certain things about my class simply are going to remain, their critique becomes a bit more genuine.
An example:
When I first started FVR (we call it Free Voluntary MANDATORY Reading in my class because they really don’t and should not have the choice to decline!) I had a lot of students return the weekly or bi-weekly evals with very negative comments about hating to read. I explained the research and told them that either they could read OR they could read. As Tina Hargaden says, if your book sucks, go find one that doesn’t suck so bad. They understood quickly that reading was here to stay. However, a valuable piece of information I received after we had been doing FVR for a few months was, “sometimes you get caught up in your book and don’t realize we have read for much longer than the goal of 5-7 minutes.” (I always read while they read. ALWAYS). I took that little nugget and began using a timer. That way, the kids who really feel like they are suffering, know that I will only make them “suffer” for a short amount of time.
You can download my End of Course Evaluation here.
Please make a copy and adapt to your needs.
An End of Course Evaluation is given, as the name implies, at the very end of the year. I really want to know what sticks out as the “thing” they liked/didn’t like. This year, I only teach levels 3 and four. For the majority of my students, this is their final opportunity to critique. Guess what? Not a single student wrote that reading was the thing they didn’t like. They informed me that they don’t like when we do traditional Movie Talk with the pausing during the action of the video. I already knew this, which is why I change it up and only sometimes do it traditionally and most of the time I make screenshots of the video into slides that we discuss.
If your school year is winding down and you have the opportunity to give student evaluations, I hope you do so! You have all summer to reflect and decide if the student is just whining or if a tweek needs to take place to make the activity more palatable.
Happy teaching!
