How To Turn Student Feedback Into Action

How do we use the powerful resource of our students' voices to impact our practice and outcomes? 

The need to incorporate student perspective became more urgent (and obvious!) to me after an experience during COVID. Our district conducted student, family, and staff surveys to check in, and the results highlighted student mental health as a major concern. A team from student services created a plan and began to communicate resources for students to utilize. But my students continued to express frustration with the lack of support. What was going on? When I asked for further feedback from them, I discovered that there was a fundamental disconnect. The adult stakeholders learned that the avenues they were using to communicate were not the avenues that the students were using! 

The adults said, "We put it on Twitter." 

The students said, "We aren't on Twitter. We are on Instagram and Snapchat." 

Facepalm. 🤦‍♀️ We changed the communication strategy and realized we could have shared mental health resources in a much more effective and timely way if we had gone to the students for feedback on the plan in the first place.  

Let's explore how to gather actionable feedback and what to do with it when you've got it.

Start With What You Have

What feedback lines do you already have? Do you give student, staff, and family surveys? If not, start there! Here are some other suggestions to help the process: 

• Define a clear goal for the collection of feedback.
• Choose avenues to collect additional feedback when needed, such as a more detailed survey that digs deeper, focus groups, or a community forum. 
• Establish a timeline for feedback collection.

Analyze With Intention

Once you’ve collected your feedback, be intentional about how your team digs into the quantitative and qualitative data. Survey data can be overwhelming, especially when you have a large number of students. You may have hundreds or even thousands of data points and comments. Here are some suggestions to help: 

• Divide up the work. Your leadership or PBIS team can break into groups to synthesize assigned data sets and highlight the most important findings. 
• Analyze survey data across stakeholder groups if possible. Look for trends such as consistently high ratings or low ratings across all stakeholder groups, along with inconsistencies like high rating(s) from one stakeholder group but lower rating(s) from other stakeholder groups.
• If you find a trend of low scores or inconsistencies across stakeholder groups, consider this a starting point to gather more feedback. This is not a "gotcha" but a chance to dig into practices and discover where disconnects may occur.

		Real World Example I was fortunate to collaborate with an insightful and reflective middle school principal and her leadership team. The school was on a watchlist, and the principal was open to addressing needs and willing to work to make positive changes. We started the process with student, teacher, and family survey data. When we dug into the data, we noticed a difference in the ratings in two areas between staff and students: building positive relationships and making learning meaningful.  Here’s what we found:  The teachers rated their practices high in building relationships and making learning meaningful.  The student ratings, however, were much lower in these areas! We found several sub-groups of students who indicated they felt very disconnected from their teachers and the learning. What could be leading to this difference in perception between staff and students? We crafted some questions that could help us dig into these areas, and utilized PLC time to explore more deeply with staff. We worked together to create and structure some student focus groups to gather additional feedback. Then, we set up a timeline for gathering the feedback. In other words, we utilized initial survey data, cross-compared the data, identified a trend, and created an action plan and timeline to gather more feedback. We were on our way to making changes that would lead to greater student achievement!

We Have Feedback, Now What?

Education can sometimes feel like an endless loop of collecting data and more data and circling back around. Collecting data/feedback is essential. Assembling the right data/feedback is important. Using that data/feedback to drive our practice is just as, if not more, important. 

Just like our planning to collect feedback, we need clear steps for acting on the feedback we collect: 

Whether it's your school leadership team, school improvement team, or MTSS team, having a straightforward process when examining data to guide our feedback actions is helpful. Feel free to download an editable version of the below checklist/protocol and utilize it to plan for effective, meaningful feedback collection. 

Real World Example Back to our middle school! It was clear that our middle school teachers and students were perceiving relationship-building and the connection to learning differently. Teachers saw getting-to-know-you activities during the first week of school as sufficient to build relationships. They also saw things like stating learning goals as making learning meaningful. Students believed that teachers didn't see them as individuals and that learning wasn’t connected to their experiences and daily lives. After a rich conversation, the principal and leadership team decided to do a faculty and staff book study that connected building relationships and rigorous learning in a concise, actionable way: All staff had a chance to see and discuss the survey feedback They were introduced to the book study and goals for learning together to address that feedback data.  The principal and leadership team developed straightforward focus questions related to the identified growth area for each book chapter. The team also communicated the book study focus to the school community (students and families), and community forums were established throughout the year to continue sharing with key stakeholders and to elicit further feedback. School leadership regularly visited with student groups on campus to gather their insights and additional information connected to the book study.

But…How Do We Know It’s Honest Feedback? 

A question I often hear posed when we talk about feedback is, "But how do we know students are being honest?" One thing I have learned in working with student groups and input over the years is that, for the most part, students will be brutally honest with us if they know we are listening. In my first year of teaching a new class at the high school, I had students write a final reflective letter to me about their learning experiences. I'll never forget reading Chelsea's letter. She had written, "I really like having to write this letter because it made me stop and think. And I have to ask you, Ms. B, why you haven't had us do this more often? I mean, you had us do other things, but I think this would have been better." Okay, Chelsea, I hear you! The following semester, I embedded the reflective letters more regularly! Chelsea was right; it did make our learning stronger. 

There are steps that help ensure an honest, open atmosphere when getting feedback from students:

• Remove bias as much as possible in the question design. When we ask, "What do you love about our school?" we say you must love it. Instead, pose an open-ended question like "What's your honest opinion about our school community?" Leave the door open for people to share their thoughts and convey that we want to hear what they say, whether good or not.
• Be intentional in wording survey questions to reduce misunderstanding as much as possible. Questions are easily misinterpreted, which is why follow-up feedback is best collected through structures like focus groups and forums. 

Real World Example For example, an elementary school my colleague was helping survey noted that 3rd-5th grade students stated that drugs and gun violence were a big concern in their school. This school had not seen any drug or gun violations, so follow-up was definitely needed. It turned out that the students were worried about these issues in society at large, not in their school. After all, they were taught that drugs and violence are bad and hurt people, so of course, they are a “big concern.” This feedback helped the staff reassure students that their school is a safe place to be, and to change the way they surveyed students to provide additional explanations and directions for each question.

• Seek to understand the community culture. Has the school continually established open lines of communication, or is this a new process? We are more likely to get honest feedback if we already have strong, established relationships. If not, consider how to build that while collecting feedback.

💡 Related Resource: The Importance of Engaging Student Voices in MTSS

Conclusion

That middle school we have been following? They completed their book study for the year. They circled back around and re-surveyed their student and staff stakeholder groups. Both groups saw improvement, and there was a closer connection between their perceptions! They also heard from families that they felt better connected to the school. I was not surprised to see their success because they had followed the process and been intentional about addressing a specific area of need. And the work didn’t stop there! They were able to celebrate their successes, define a clear area for improvement in instructional practices for the following school year, and repeat the steps to continue moving their work forward.

MTSS helps us serve our students because it provides a framework to understand, gather data, create action plans, implement plans, and monitor progress. We can achieve even greater results when we develop open lines of communication and gather effective feedback directly from the students we are serving!

Branching Minds Professional Services can help you create a plan for gathering data and using it to drive a healthy school culture and better student outcomes. We can’t wait to partner with you! Request a consultation today >>

Key Takeaways: 

• Look for trends and inconsistencies in the data you have. This ensures a focused effort on areas that are important to your students. 
• Set clear goals, create detailed action plans, and implement changes based on the identified areas of improvement. This ensures that feedback translates into meaningful action.
• Share results and keep stakeholders informed about the steps being taken to earn trust and get better feedback in the future. 
• Use focus groups and forums for more in-depth discussions about the “why” behind the data. 
  

Citations

Harper, Amelia. “Improvement Science Helps School Districts Succeed at New Initiatives.” K-12 Dive, 3 July 2019. https://www.k12dive.com/news/improvement-science-helps-school-districts-succeed-at-new-initiatives/558146/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2024. 

Navolio, Maria. “Best Practices in School Improvement Planning.” Hanover Research, 27 Dec. 2023, www.hanoverresearch.com/insights-blog/best-practices-in-school-improvement-planning/?org=k-12-education. 

Notes and Reflections: Using Data to Guide School Improvement, North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 2004, files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED518630.pdf.