Creating a Culture of Feedback in Middle School

As a teacher, I have always valued moments when I can learn and improve my practice. Some of the most meaningful feedback I’ve gotten has come from my students. By creating a classroom culture that encourages students to speak up and share their unique perspectives, I’ve been able to create more collaborative and trusting relationships. This has established a foundation of belonging where students feel like they are part of a larger community where they matter and feel safe enough to engage in productive struggle.

Backward Mapping Through a Student’s Lens

Creating a culture of feedback requires intentional, thoughtful planning to provide opportunities for and responsiveness to students’ ideas and input. A good starting place is in unit and lesson preparation. When reviewing the curriculum and lesson plans, teachers can spend time analyzing assessments and materials through a student lens to determine where to provide opportunities for students to make choices and demonstrate agency over their learning.

If you are willing to be vulnerable with your students, co-constructing assessments or success criteria can demystify the learning process and demonstrate that there is more than one way to achieve success. Students’ thoughts and suggestions could be more innovative, relevant to their lives, and rigorous than the ideas you would have had in isolation.

Engaging in this deep planning also helps provide a range of options for engagement and helps to establish strategic structures for gathering student choice and feedback.

Some feedback mechanisms I have used include middle- or end-of-lesson learning checks, feedback surveys, a classroom suggestion box, individual and small group conferences, and student focus groups. All of these have provided my students and me with an opportunity to learn from, influence, and collaborate with each other.

Leveraging Learning Checks throughout lessons

Learning checks are brief moments within or at the end of the lesson, where students are asked to reflect on how the learning is going, our partnership, and the classroom environment. These checks invite students to become active observers of their own cognitive processes and partners in the designing of instruction and the environment.

In the middle of the lesson, questions can be designed to help course-correct or remove any potential barriers that students may be facing in their work. Here are some helpful questions I have asked students:

• If you were stuck right now and I was busy with another student, which specific tool or resource could you try to help you take the next step?

• How well did my instructions actually match the task you are doing? What is the most confusing sentence or step? How can we fix it together?

• Where in the last five to 10 minutes did you feel your brain working the hardest? Did you feel like you were engaging in productive struggle, where your brain was being challenged, and you were growing? If not, why do you think that is?

Learning checks at the end of the lesson provide an opportunity to strengthen the shared partnership between the students and the teacher. The questions you ask can help serve as a road map for the next lesson and help students understand themselves better as learners. These are some end-of-lesson questions I have asked:

• Think about the moment in class when you felt that you had mastered or finally gotten the concept. What did a classmate or I do that made it make sense?

• If you were the teacher tomorrow, what is the first thing you would change about this lesson? How would you re-explain the content to make sure everyone understood?

• What could I have done better as a teacher today? What is one thing I did that made learning harder?

These questions are usually embedded in slides and shown at the end of the lesson, so students have a visual resource to ground their reflection.

Giving Student Feedback Surveys

While learning checks provide immediate data, a student feedback survey allows for a more comprehensive look at student experience. Each quarter, I give a student feedback survey (created in Google Forms) to students. In the survey, I target both structural and emotional learning conditions through an intentional mix of declarative sentences and interrogative questions.

Students’ responses provide me with insight into the barriers my students face in learning and the conditions they need to belong and feel safe enough to take academic risks.

Moving From Me to We

To leverage the student survey data, I work with my grade-level team to examine our student feedback more closely using a data-driven dialogue protocol. This structured approach helps our team internalize the data through four phases:

1. Assumptions, predications, and wonderings. Before looking over the student feedback data, teachers share what they think students said within the survey. Providing space for teachers to make predications and wonderings honors their professional intuition and also highlights any potential blind spots for the team.

2. Visual representation and synthesis. Teachers individually comb through the feedback data and create a visual representation of the data as they go. When teachers are finished, they collaboratively synthesize their individual understandings into a collective visual that represents the student experience as a whole for that grade level.

3. The “Start, Stop, and Continue” protocol. With visual evidence, teachers can take collective action by identifying what they will start doing (example: implementing new strategies), stop doing (example: eliminating busywork), and continue doing (example: building relationships) as a team to better support students.

4. Closing the loop and establishing accountability. The process doesn’t end once teachers identify what they will start, stop, and continue. Teachers take back the data and engage students in discussions around it. To further the impact, teachers and students can create check-in dates where they can collectively reflect and discuss progress.

By opening up our practice to student feedback and sharing our own growth goals as teachers, we position students as experts and invite them to be accountability partners in transforming the learning experience with them.