As coaches and facilitators of professional learning, our work revolves around providing teachers with constructive feedback that will help them improve their instruction.   This process makes good sense to us and we likely feel pretty comfortable with it.  I wonder though, how comfortable we feel with asking for and receiving feedback on our own practice?  Hmm…

My school designer and I wrapped up our last session of professional development this week (we’re on a construction calendar and finish the school year next month!) and included 20 minutes in the agenda to collect feedback from teachers.  Comfortable or not, we both feel that this feedback is a critical piece in providing high quality professional development that supports our Work Plan targets and teacher needs.  To collect teacher thoughts, we designed a survey using Survey Monkey (you can also use Google Docs to create a survey).  In building the survey, we asked ourselves what information would be most useful to know to improve PD next year.  We then started brainstorming different questions and revised from there.  Here’s our final product:

We haven’t yet reviewed the results, but I look forward to doing so.  Hopefully there will be several “Woo Hoo’s!” and some “Ah Ha’s!”  While there may also be a few “ouches,” no big deal…we’ll grow to be better as a result.

Another idea is to design a similar survey to collect feedback from your coachees on the structure of coaching in your school.  I did this last year and received some great feedback to grow on.

I hope this post will give you some ideas and motivation for collecting feedback of your own.

Thanks for reading,