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Self Evaluation For European Schools (SEFES)
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Diary
Hamburg
Please choose one of the documentation items below:
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28.6.2005 | 13:05
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Germany
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Experience with students' feedback
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Students‘ feedback: not teacher-bashing, but a means to support the teaching-learning process
Before I started with SEFES and before I attended a course at the local „Landesinstitut für Lehrerfortbildung“ (institute for teachers‘ training) on students‘ feedback I had thought that evaluation consisted of questionnaires that you handed out to your students at the end of a course, hoping that they would fill it in favourably.
Now, however, I know that there is much more to it. My concept has changed and what I find most important about it are the following two aspects:
1. students‘ feedback should not be carried out at the end, but several times in the run of the course, i.e. it accompanies teaching and learning and thus has an impact on it
2. students‘ feedback changes the roles of teachers and students, as the students take over responsibility for the teaching-learing process.
To explain how I have worked with it so far, I would like to describe my experience (failures included) in my advanced English class.
1. I had started with my new English course in August 04 and on October 18, 2004 I wanted to do a first students‘ feedback without having had much experience. I chose a graph with two axes indicating the grade of satisfaction with the atmosphere in class and the quality of the lessons. The result was that most of the students were more or less content, especially with the atmosphere in class, only three were not happy. Afterwards we discussed the result and I wrote down a few aspects to be improved, like more written tasks, discussion of more current events, etc.
2. After a few months, on January 17, 05 I repeated the same procedure. I was quite taken aback, though, when the results for the quality of the lessons had not improved, but deteriorated.„Am I a bad teacher? What have I done wrong?“, I asked myself quite frustrated. At the time I had already started my course at the institute and showed the results to the colleagues there. Soon it became quite obvious that being satisfied with the lessons is rather vague, and you never know what induced them to mark „less satisfied“ – maybe they had noticed that their marks hadn’t been as good as expected. My colleagues also had to remind me that lessons do not only depend on the teacher, but on the students as well – I seemed to have forgotten that.
3. Equipped with supportive ideas from my colleagues I made another, more professional attempt. On Februar 2, 05 I handed out little cards to my students on which they were to finish the sentence „I am satisfied with the English lessons, when......“ I collected the cards and we made clusters on the board each one dealing with a specific topic:
- variety of methods
- interesting topics
- number of additional assignments
- usage of different media
- quality and quantity of the discussions
- structure of the lessons and the units
- individual progress
I then handed out photocopies of a „dartboard“, the students filled in the topics outside each segment and then they marked each segment according to their satisfaction. They could also make further comments on the back. After collecting it all I transferred the results to a transparency, so that in the next lesson we could all have a look at them. The first remark of a student was: „You can’t make everybody happy“, as it was quite evenly distributed. Nevertheless we started to discuss each point with the aim of reaching mutual agreements. I toke notes and presented the agreements to the course on a huge sheet of paper, that was hung up in the classroom and was supposed to stay there till the next date of evaluation which we already agreed upon and which was written down there as well. Improving our lessons now involved the students as well as me. For example, the students respect each other during discussions, don’t interrupt each other and try not to repeat themselves. My part as a teacher is to stop discussions if they don’t lead anywhere and to write down key words on the board. As to interesting topics the students have the possibility to do a presentation and lead a discussion once a week on a topic they find particularly interesting.
These are just examples of how teacher and students are suddenly responsible for the lessons. The students also told me that they appreciated it being more involved.
I must admit, these three lessons (that’s how long the whole process took) were very, very exhausting. Discussing details of the lessons was a totally different role for me. I was not in control anymore – I plan the lessons and my English is usually better than that of my students, but here we were suddenly on a similar level – how frightening! What would they think of me, would they lose their respect for me as a teacher who needs the students to tell her how to teach?
What I told the students was that I see myself as their coach who is in charge of helping them to learn best. I can only do that, if I know what they need, That’s why we do students‘ feedback.
This new concept of my role and accepting the responsility of the students is quite hard for me and I am constantly working on it. To lose control requires trust in myself and in the students, but it is rewarding, as it takes away a lot of pressure from me as well.
By the way, on our next date of evaluation (April 7) we had a look at the agreements again. We checked whether we had kept them, if not, why not, if anything should be added and reached new agreements. Only recently I handed out the „dartboard“ again with the same topics as in February, and we could see that in some fields there had been improvements. In others not, like in the one about individual progress and I asked the students what they would need from me, but they said it was up to them – fine with me! Again we discussed it and found some new agreements. This will go on – a process!
There are still some students who don’t seem to be interested when we do the evaluation. O.K., it’s up to them, but if they are not satisfied, I could always tell them: „It’s not my problem You have had your chance!“
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Angelika
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20.1.2004 | 15:31
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Germany
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Lesson today
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This was a nice lesson today, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Three groups of students did their presentations on unexplained phenomena. All groups tried to give their best making their presentations on palm reading, unusual abilities, hypnosis/walking on fire as interesting as possible, using transparencies, role plays, and an extract from the film “Rainman”. Some of them even tried to involve their fellow students. The presentation where all students were involved was the one about palm reading. Everybody was looking at his hand trying to find out something about his character and chances in later life. It was good fun.
Of course, some of the presenters had a bad pronunciation and made some mistakes, but still, also the weak students wanted to do well at their presentation and they succeeded. It is astonishing what students are able to if they are actually motivated, and in this case they obviously were.
---- to be continued ----
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Angelika
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16.1.2004 | 15:31
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Germany
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Second lesson
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This is the second lesson dealing with the subject. I start with testing the vocabulary in order to make them think in English and to prepare them for the next task. Then I show them the beginning of the film “Don’t look now”. Afterwards the students are asked to describe what they have seen. This is more or less o.k. I’m still not sure if I should interrupt them and correct them right away, but running the risk that they don’t want to speak at all any more. The alternative would be to do it afterwards which is a lot nicer. However, when I hear them say “She fells down” I simply can’t control myself and interrupt right away. I somehow have to be more consistent.
In the film the main character has a premonition about his daughter’s death. I now want the students to describe this aspect of the film, not just the order of events. They are also asked to use the vocabulary I checked at the beginning of the lesson. It seems to be very difficult for them, although I don’t know why. Is it just laziness or are they simply not capable of doing it – which would be worse?!
Having the outcome of my last lesson in mind my original plan was that they get together with a partner and talk with him/her about premonitions they might have had or they might have heard of to ensure that everybody is talking in English (although most of them would not take the chance but speak in German). Then a few of them would present to the class what their partner has told them. However, regrettably not enough time is left and I ask the whole class to talk about premonitions. A few students actually say something, which is quite interesting, the rest of the course is quiet. So the majority hasn’t said a word of English in the whole lesson. This I must definitely change – it is my plan for the next lesson.
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Angelika
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9.1.2004 | 15:30
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Germany
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Starting my diary
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Today is the day where I want to start my diary and I haven’t really slept well, not a good precondition to make a good impression…
I start the lesson with collecting different kinds of unexplained phenomena on the board which takes rather long.
Then the students are reading a short text dealing with the topic – e.g. computers used to be magic some time ago. And I have the intention to trigger a discussion with the question:
Imagine in 1910 you see a computer: what might be strange/mysterious about it? Only a few students can or want to say something about it, it is very slow and gets boring. Although I find the idea very interesting, it does not seem to be of any interest to the students.
The next step is to write down useful vocabulary from the text to enlarge their range of vocabulary.
When I ask if there is anybody who doesn’t believe in unexplained phenomena only one student lifts his finger. However, when I ask what the students believe in I get only a few responses.
My last question “Has anything unexplained ever happened to you? does the trick, quite a lot of students are eager to say something.. Regrettably there is not much time left, we have come to the end of the lesson. This definitely has to be continued in the next lesson
On the whole the lesson was dragging on a bit, the students did not participate as much as I expected. One reason was that I could not concentrate so well and therefore I could not react as quickly as I should have done and I could not sense what would actually motivate the students and on the whole everything had taken longer than expected.
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Angelika
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9.1.2004 | 15:29
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Germany
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Unit in my English class
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I have decided to describe a unit in my English class (11th form, i.e. the students are between18 and 20 years old and have already had 8 years of English at school. I have got 27 students and the majority (about 80 %) can neither speak fluently nor write without awful mistakes. Actually, I have never had a group with so many students with such poor knowledge of English. In the last exam I had to read expressions like “she didn’t can went”. I sometimes wonder what they have done English-wise in the last 8 years ?! As a group they are quite friendly, but they are very fond of talking with each other in German about things they are interested in, which are usually not part of the lesson. Of course, in my point of view, they had better be attentive and practise their listening, reading and writing abilities in English, but so far it has been very difficult for me to convince them of it. That’s the reason why I decided to do a short unit with them about a topic they might be interested in: unexplained phenomena. My aim is to motivate them and to make them participate more by doing short presentations on various aspects dealing with this topic. Furthermore I want to read a novel with them (“Don’t look now” by Daphne du Maurier). I have also got the film on video.
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Angelika
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