In Term 2 and Term 3 of 2020 Craigieburn Secondary College, a school of over 1000 students from Years 7-12 located in Melbourne’s north, used the Distance Learning Survey on Teaching Effectiveness to enhance the opportunity to receive feedback on remote teaching and learning. The flexibility of Pivot’s Distance Learning Survey allowed Craigieburn Secondary College to get real time feedback from students on remote learning practices and determine the levels of success that they were having with their students.
Why was it important for you to get feedback from your students during remote learning?
We have used Pivot for a number of years and have found the Student Perception Survey on Teaching Effectiveness to be a really valuable source of feedback for improving our teaching practice. Remote learning gave us the opportunity to expand on our teaching toolkits and we wanted to ensure that we were able to capture the elements of these remote learning practices that worked well so that we could bring them back to our classroom practice once we returned to onsite learning. The Distance Learning Survey has been really valuable in forming an understanding of the best teaching methods for remote learning. Without knowing how many more periods of distance learning we are going to go through, feedback that continuously builds our practice in remote teaching and learning strategies has become invaluable, especially as it becomes increasingly difficult to keep students engaged in a remote learning context.
What did you learn from the Distance Learning Survey about your student’s experiences during remote learning?
Students continuously amaze us in their resilience towards whatever the world will present to them and in their passion for learning, even when this isn’t always obvious. Collecting feedback from the Distance Learning Survey helped us to understand how much our students value their teachers and how much students appreciated having someone there for them each day. It also revealed that students clearly recognised the effort that teachers put into making learning experiences as engaging as possible during remote learning. These reminders proved important for teachers because these positives were not always clear or front of mind due to the challenges that remote learning presented.
Did you learn anything from the Distance Learning Survey that changed your approach to teaching and supporting students during remote learning?
As a school, we use the Distance Learning Survey as a tool to deepen our understanding of our practice. Through a structured approach, including lesson plans and resources, teachers took their Distance Learning Survey results back to their classes to discuss them. From this, students worked with their teachers to set teaching and classroom goals. Students therefore were able to provide detailed and tailored feedback to each of their teachers on what they believed they could benefit from in each of their classes. These feedback conversations were valuable in informing teachers planning as they continued on in remote learning.
To learn more about Pivot’s Distance Learning Survey on Teaching Effectiveness, go to pivotpl.com/covid-19-resources or contact us at pivotpl.com/contact-us.
