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As usual, I’ve asked students in all my classes to do anonymous evaluations, and I’ll share the results here (see Best Posts On Students Evaluating Classes (And Teachers) ).

I’ll begin with my ELL Newcomers class.  Posts about my US History class, and IB Theory of Knowledge courses will follow.

Students were generally very happy with the class and with me, and I’m not going to share the answers to all the questions (you can see the entire survey here).

But I did want to share a few results I found particularly interesting:

 

Even though students were overwhelmingly positive in their feelings about the class and about my teaching, their response to this question was concerning:

Yes, sixty-six percent of my students said they learned a lot of English, but having thirty-three percent say they didn’t is concerning.

In response, I’m going to make two actions a higher priority: One, I’ve only had individual conversations with one-half of the class about how they are feeling about the class and their English-learning goals, so I’ve got to make meetings happen quickly with the rest of them. And, secondly, I’ve asked peer tutors to input student weekly test scores into Google Sheets and create individual charts so that students can visually see the progress their making, and I’ve got to push them to make that happen more quickly. Showing students their progress can be both an informational and motivational opportunity.

 

These other two responses were noteworthy (you’ll notice a slight difference between English and Spanish instructions for the second question, but I clarified that mistake in verbal instructions):

 

So, it’s very clear that students feel like working with peer tutors in small groups are a big help to them.  And since those groups are the central parts of our class, those responses are a good sign.

And, it seems pretty clear they are not enthusiastic about asking-and-answering questions in our daily oral language practice activity (though, based on written comments later in the survey, that might be because people don’t like doing it in front of the class).

However, the class splits evenly down the middle on the other two main parts of instruction – our online daily warm-ups, and how we end most classes with a game reinforcing the content we covered that day.

During those warm-ups, twice a week peer tutors take students out to both have them read aloud, and for an SEL check-in.  I think in my individual meetings I’ll ask students if they would like to read to peer tutors more than once a week as an alternative to working online.

The online games are invaluable formative assessment tools that inform my instruction, so I don’t want to give them up.  I generally use Quizizz, but perhaps switching it up and using other game platforms might make it more interesting….

Any reader feedback on these results are welcome…..