1.1. Hamburg (GER)

1.2. Kaunas (LIT)

1.3. Reykjavik (ISL)

1.4. Rovaniemi (FIN)

1.5. Rzeszow (POL)

2.1. summary

2.2. joint activity reports

2.3. evaluation

3.1. feedback

3.2. peer evaluation

3.3. diary

3.4. photo evaluation

3.5. diverse

4.1. SEFES meetings 1-6

4.2. individual visits

Student Feedback – Evaluation as a Process

Objective:

To improve my teaching and to make the students feel responsible for the teaching-learning process

Methods:  graph, answering a question on cards and clustering them according to topics, dartboards, written agreements

When/Who/Where:

October 2004 till June 2005/ 18 students of an advanced English class (12^th form), teacher: Angelika Wollermann, Staatliche Handelsschule mit Wirtschaftsgymnasium “Am Lämmermarkt”, Hamburg

Description/Results (+/-)/Development and Consequences:

Before I started with SEFES and before I attended a course at the local „Landesinstitut für Lehrerfortbildung“ (institute for teachers‘ training) on student 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. student 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. student 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 student 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 student 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!“

Examples:  

photos of

• clustering of cards
• agreements
• dartboard