My Students' Report Card to Me

The end of our school year is filled with pages of documents in which teachers provide feedback on student performance -- report cards, progress reports, and printouts of standardized tests. The feedback teachers receive is from formal and informal observations by administrators. Parents write sweet notes of thanks, and students write them, too. However, I have learned that it is important to allow students to give ME feedback on my teaching. Yes, a teacher report card!

When I passed out the report card forms to my students, I had two expectations. First, I figured I’d get the “all A’s” version from those sweet students who think I’m great and always give me precious notes and cards. Second, I figured there would be one or two zings from kiddos who had had some discipline bumps in the road. I was prepared for these. I also hoped that I’d get some honest feedback about how I did this year. Here's an item analysis of the scores for each subject.

Wow, my kiddos took this so seriously! I loved the feedback they gave me, even when some of it stung a bit. Reading was my highest scored subject, with science being my lowest scored. I’ve compiled some of the comments below. 

What I find amusing about some of the comments related to science is that I showed fewer videos this year than in past years. Of course, the children didn't know that. In reflecting on their comments about having more experiments instead of videos, I realized science was the subject in which I used videos the most for note taking. And to be totally defensive, we DID do experiments! My takeaway from this is that even more experiments is a good thing in science. I will take this to heart in my science planningfor next year.

The other puzzling piece of feedback was about multiplication. We worked on arrays in the fall, and then came back to them in the spring. We worked on ‘rows and columns’ activities, made arrays with manipulatives, and labeled them with multiplication facts. Hmmm… A couple commented that we should do more with multiplication. I suppose the student who said, “I love how you taught us to do multiplication without us knowing it!” said it best. A few of them didn’t KNOW they were learning multiplication. Yikes!

This feedback is valuable! It tells me the insecure children need more encouragement, and I need to touch base with them about things they aren't confident about. It also tells me I need to be even more deliberate in stating learning goals and objectives. I need to make sure the children understand what they're learning. While my administrators gave thoughtful, constructive feedback on my teaching techniques through formal observations, the children were candid. Do more of this. Do less of that. I love it!

If you’d like to use this end of year report card with your students, you can grab a copy here.

Happy summer!