Looking through the Fall 2015 results of our Student Questionnaire, I once again see the disparity in what sophomores report versus what seniors indicate. Looking at my overall scores, I am pleased with results from this first year back in the classroom full-time, even if these results do not relate to my “goal for the year.”[1] The stats and the list of questions are here, and the freeform, written comments from students are here.

Overall

My bookend scores, the highest and lowest, have been the same for several years. The highest score – with a mean of 5.82[2] – that students give me continues to be on Q1, “The teacher is generally well-organized and prepared for class.” I would tend to agree: I am organized and prepared for class… because that’s my job![3] Yes, on top of the 40-hours a week that I work, I put another 18 on top of that each week, but that’s what it takes me to be well-organized, prepared for class, and current in my field[4].

On the opposite end of the spectrum, my lowest score, with a mean of 5.26[5], was for Q16, “The teacher is available to students outside class time for tutoring, review work, or to answer questions.” I take (mock) humbrage with this being my lowest score. I get to campus every day at 7:15 and am in my classroom, available for students, and I’m available via email from 6am until 10pm weekdays and 9–9 weekends. That’s pretty available! I actually think this question is thrown-off by a few other variables. First, students have a prep period, just as teachers do, and it’s quite likely that during their Resource Period, when they’re supposed to meet with teachers and counselors, I’m actually teaching; they have only one Resource Period and I’m teaching four class periods. Second, for a quarter of my students, class meets in a different classroom than I am available for such review and conversations; these 26 sophomores may just not know where to find me. The third issue is that three days a week, after school, I am either in a meeting for one committee or another, or out for a run[6].

Sophomores and Seniors

When I look at the subscores for sophomores and for seniors a few other questions pop out at me.

For the sophomores, I score highest on Q4, “Tests and assignments are corrected and returned to me, and I know where I stand in this class in terms of my grade.” Since everything is collected and graded in Canvas, my turn-around time is quick and students get graded work, with comments, returned as soon as I click “submit” in SpeedGrader. That means they’re getting feedback returned on days when class doesn’t meet as well as after school and on weekends, depending on when I do the grading. And my second-lowest score with the sophomores was for Q7, “The teacher gives the right amount of graded assignments, tests, and quizzes in order to fairly evaluate my performance.” I suspect they think the number of graded assignments is unnecessarily high; I suspect they actually need to be doing more work.

With my seniors, two questions tied with the highest mean, a 5.96: Q10, “The teacher knows the subject area very well,” and Q17, “The teacher is interested in and enthusiastic about teaching this class.” Yeah, that’s accurate. The lowest score the seniors gave me, a 5.38[7], was for Q2, “The teacher maintains enough classroom discipline so the class and I can learn.” What I find most interesting about this is that a few students wrote free-form comments on this particular topic as well; this comment is illustrative: “on the other hand, there are days when one stray comment from one person ruins the class period for everyone else who is trying to learn.” After 17-years, I’ve figured out what’s on the AP Psychology test, and I know what tangential questions we can spend time on, and which we shouldn’t. Further, I’m always mindful of students purposefully trying to distract the teacher from the lesson with a question, largely because I saw that so clearly with a previous colleague. So, yes, there are topics that I’ll spend class time on which is not on our tests or on the AP test at the end of the year, but I do it mindfully, and I think most students trust my judgment here.

Conclusion

All in all, I’m quite happy with the results of this year’s student questionnaire. I am clearly still working on the sophomore curriculum and instruction, but oddly their written comments were surprisingly unhelpful in this department. I’ll have to find my own way of measuring student perception of my version of World History 2.