While going through my Twitter feed a couple of weeks ago, I came across Bianca Hewe’s blog post on gaining feedback from students in order to improve your teaching. My year 7 class this year, which I have taught for English, Maths, Science, Geography and History, have been completing weekly evaluations on how they have been progressing academically and in their project work each week. They have also competed end-of-term evaluations. I have always valued student feedback, mainly because I think they are the best judges of my teaching and are the best placed to provide me with advice on how I can improve my teaching and their learning. Also, I think it emphasises that the teacher is a learner as well. This year we have been using Geoff Petty’s goals, medals and missions model of feedback and have created an atmosphere that everyone always has something new to learn and something they can improve on. So asking for students to evaluate my teaching further emphasises the teacher as a learner and further enhances the feeling of a learning community for the class.

For the end-of-year evaluation, I decided to move away from my usual multiple choice ranking questions in Survey Monkey and modified the questions on Bianca’s posts instead. I thought having 10 short answer questions will give me a better insight this time, especially into the classroom atmosphere and the relationships that the students have formed with each other. So here are the 10 questions I asked my year7s, a summary of their responses and my reflections on their responses:

1. What was the nicest thing someone in our class did for you this year?

Year 7s said that the nicest thing their classmates did for them this year were to share food with them when they forgot recess or lunch, lend them equipment such as pens, helped them with maths and made them feel welcome. I think the integrated curriculum approach, where year 7s stay in the same group with the same teacher in the same classroom for 5 KLAs, have created a very close-knit learning community. My class works like a team. They look out for each other and help each other.

2. What was the most challenging part of our class for you?

Year 7s came up with a mixture of responses for this question. Some of their responses include working with others productively in projects, writing persuasive texts and maths. Not surprisingly, algebra came up very frequently as something they found challenging. To be fair, these year 7s are achieving at a much higher level than any other similar cohort that I have taught, but they have very high expectations of themselves.

3. If you could change one thing that happened in our class, what would it be?

Seating plans and the design of the classroom came up quite frequently in the responses. I have been experimenting with different arrangements of furniture in the classroom that will allow students to easily move furniture to suit different types of activities. I haven’t got it down perfect. Some of the things I have difficult are the placement of students in a way that minimises disruptions and also allows everyone to have a clear view of the main presentation areas (students have a seating plan for most activities and are allowed to choose where they sit and rearrange the furniture during PBL activities).

4. What are three things you did this year to help your classmates?

The responses here are very similar to question 1.

5. What is something that was hard for you at the start of the year, but is easier now?

Algebra, science and maths in general were the most frequent responses. I am very pleased with them saying they find science easier now as I have spent a lot of effort on the pedagogy of their science activities (eg. Using SOLO as a framework).

6. What is your favourite part of our Integrated Curriculum lessons? Why?

Games based learning and project based learning were the response from almost every student. The reasons they gave ranged from learning being fun to being able to work in a team to having choice and being creative.

7. What is something you taught your teacher or classmates this year?

They taught me a lot of things this year. I never knew you could freeze an image on the IWB until a boy showed me where to press on the remote.

8. Which project did you learn the most from? Why?

Overwhelmingly, students said the Minecraft project was the favourite. I was expecting them to say “because it’s Minecraft” as their reasons, but none of the reason referred to using Minecraft at all. They all said they learnt a lot about ratios and the history of the Parthenon.

9. What are some things Ms Leung could have done to make this year better for you?

The responses to this question varied. Quite a few students said more laptops in class. We had 12 laptops between 30 students. What I’m worried about is that they will have no laptops in class next year and will possibly be the first group of students to experience the end of DER. We have experienced so many technology-rich learning experiences which are authentic 21^st century learning experiences and next year we will go backwards.

10. What advice would you give to students who will be Ms Leung’s class next year?

I was very surprised at the responses at this question. Being 155cm and just having my personality, I have often lacked the ability to “scare” students into behaving. I rely very heavily on building a rapport with students and good learning design to manage their behaviour. However, the responses to this question from year 7s indicate that they see me as someone having very high expectations for their behaviour. Their responses include “always follow her instructions”, “don’t be rude” and “don’t ever take your phone out without her permission”.

As the school year of 2012 draws to a close, it is time to look back at the year and reflect on what I have learnt.

Here are the top 5 lessons I have learnt as learner and leader:

Lesson #5 – It’s all about students and learning

I have always put my students’ learning first but this year I had the opportunity to work with a group of amazing year 7 students for 14 hours a week. So instead of the traditional high school way of having students in separate hour blocks, I had the got to learn with my year 7 class for continuous blocks of time. I taught this year 7 class for English, Maths, Science, Geography and History and it has allowed me to explore the following:

• Project based learning that are all cross-curricular
• Games based learning
• Various ways of providing student feedback including Geoff Petty’s goals, medals and missions
• How learning spaces can be and should be used to complement teacher instruction and student activities
• How to create an online learning community

Overall this year really allowed me to focus on learning and students as individual learners rather than pushing content. Having to teach year 7 in this way almost killed me and this year has been even harder than my first year of teaching in terms of workload pressures. But I learnt a lot.

Lesson #4 – It’s not enough to be a hard worker with good ideas

To be an effective leader, you need to do more than just work hard. I always knew that, but this year I have implemented quite a few changes in my faculty. Some of it have been really successful while others have not been as successful as I would have liked. From these experiences I have learnt that:

•  Sometimes it is necessary to move in baby steps
• Teachers need to be brought into a learning journey for significant change to occur, tailored to their individual professional learning needs.
• Not everything can be done at once. I’m one of those impatient people who like to just do everything in one go, but that isn’t always feasible and if it was, it might not be productive for others. I learnt that it’s usually better to do one or two things each week that lead to bigger changes.

Lesson #3 – Look after yourself

One of the things I struggled with this year was a healthy work-life balance. Year 7 integrated curriculum and other aspects of work took up much more of my time and effort in comparison to previous years that it did affect my physical health. At times I wasn’t eating as well as I should have been or exercising as much as I should have been. While the workload wasn’t forced upon me by anyone except myself. As I write this post, I am recovering from a rather bad case of the flu. It has probably become worse because I knew I was sick but still went to school for two days because there were things “that had to be done”. While the ultimate aim of my work was to improve student learning, I was reminded that we need to look after ourselves in order to look after others when I read this post by Summer Howarth.

Lesson #2 – Believe

Believe in yourself! I have learnt this year that my opinions, my gut feelings and my knowledge is just as valid as others with a bigger reputation, more experience, etc. Don’t get me wrong. I value, respect and sought the expertise from these people but in the end I know my students, my team of teachers and my school context best.

Lesson #1 – I have the best job in the world 🙂

Not much need to be explained about this lesson. I work in the best school. I work with the best team of teachers in my faculty. I work with very awesome students.