A survey can provide educators with valuable information with regard to developing his/her craft.
The way the survey is created is important as surveys can be created simply to restate the known or surveys can be created to encourage greater growth, depth and effort.
Sharing a survey with the learning community can be daunting as we all know that there are areas for improvement--one cannot be all things. Yet giving voice to those you serve in an anonymous way has the potential to elicit development seeds for your craft and practice.
Hence, I'm about to craft a simple survey to let those in my learning community assess my work and practice. I will be looking for trends related to communication, response, direct service and care. I will also use the survey to express my intent with each area so that the community understands the intended direction and philosophical foundation of each question prior to answering the question.
There are many ways to assess one's practice in education including children's daily affect (are they happy?), project work, the quality of questions, parent conference interchanges, students' daily work and effort, test scores, professional evaluations and more. The survey will lend one more lens as to how to lead my work forward in the days and weeks ahead.
Do you use a survey as part of your own evaluation process? If so, what kinds of questions do you include, and how do you systematically respond to the results? In days to come, I'll share the survey questions, response and follow-up actions.
