Sorry for being so down yesterday - I guess I'm no better than my students. I was as dead as they were on a Monday...
But ice cream always does the trick.
In some of my conversations with other interns last night, a wise new teacher encouraged me to get feedback from my students. He'd encouraged me to not let those negative student voices get stuck in my head - more often than not those students who belligerently denounce your lesson and your attempts to engage students in an exciting and meaningful way are just negative overall. It's not my lesson or my failure. In addition, getting feedback from students allows me to see that some students are enjoying our classroom activities.
So, I put a new poll on our edmodo website asking them to rate which novel assignments they liked the most (since I had received negative comments today about our Novel #4 book review).
And the great thing about asking students for feedback is this: they feel empowered to give you more. After introducing the poll and telling students that I'm interested about how they feel about the assignment, I had students come up with me with ideas to do book trailers, children's books, and even podcasts about their future assignments. Some of them even said, "We should do our book projects like the stuff we're doing in class now!" (where I gave them several genres to choose from and they got to decide what they did).
Do I take their feedback with a grain of salt? Yes. When nearly every student in my second period class gave me a thumbs down for their opinion declaration about this assignment, I knew it wasn't a hit, but I also knew to ask deeper questions. Some of them said that they felt this was the hardest assignment we've done because I asked them to state their opinion and give me evidence (which is the skill we are working on as a department for term 2). That was such great feedback! Now I know I need to do some more in depth modeling of how to cite evidence and how to use evidence from texts to back up your own claims.
Am I doing everything my friends are doing or that other teachers in the department are doing? No. But what I am doing is being well-received (by about 85% of my students), so I can't be doing it all wrong, now can I?
We'll see how that poll on Edmodo turns out! Here's to giving students a say in the matter - I guess that's what we all are wanting, now isn't it?
Much better:)
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