Tag: surveys in the classroom

Tim Smyth, a high school teacher, shares his strategies for regularly surveying his students to build valuable connections. Hear some of the questions and approaches that tap information about his students. Tim has experienced knowing students better, having students know him, and at times knowing students who need emotional help. Instructional coaches can use Tim’s voice to spark teachers’ thinking about the possibilities. Tim started this process as a professional growth plan – that might be a great option for other teachers.

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.300] – Steve [Intro]
Hello and welcome to Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud. Together, we’ll explore ways to support teacher growth, elevate your coaching practice, and boost student success. Each week, I’ll share my own insights as well as conversations with inspiring guests to help you lead with confidence. Thanks for listening.

[00:00:25.340] – Steve
Knowing Students Builds Engagement. Our podcast guest today is Tim Smyth, whose post in Edge Utopia grabbed my attention. It’s titled, “Surveying Students Regularly Can Yield Valuable Connections.” Being a promoter of creating ways to know students and having students know that they are known, I immediately sent an invitation to Tim and was pleased to get his quick response. Tim has been teaching for over 20 years and is an author and educational consultant. He focuses on making one-on-one connections with students by surveying them to gather information about their goals, challenges, and everyday lives. Tim shares his own lived experiences and passions, such as comics and all things hip hop, as he encourages students to share their own experiences and passions in the classroom. Welcome, Tim.

[00:01:35.200] – Tim
Good morning, Steve. Good afternoon. Thanks for having me on the show.

[00:01:38.920] – Steve
Well, I’m excited that you’re here. As I read your piece, you shared that serving students began as part of a professional growth plan. I’m wondering how you arrived at that idea. I do a lot of work with schools on building professional growth plans, and I talk about a professional growth plan should be the testing of a hypothesis. I’m wondering, what was the hypothesis you had in mind as you laid out your growth plan?

[00:02:08.540] – Tim
So the PGS, something that we have to do, and it’s a really interesting way to do it rather than traditionally being observed, like you said, is coming up with that hypothesis. My idea was getting to know my students more on a human level, getting to interact with them weekly, bi weekly, as much as I could, what would the impact be on the learning in my classroom? I have found that it has had an immeasurably positive impact and effect with these surveys. If I don’t do them often enough, a lot of the times the students will say, Hey, Mr. Smyth, we haven’t done one of these in about two weeks. Can we do another? And so it’s been a really impactful thing to build community in my classroom and really just for the students to know that they’re not just a number in my classroom. It’s not just a percentage of what their grade is. I’ve gotten to know them in ways that when you’ve got five classes and 30 kids in each class and you’re going bell to bell, it’s just not possible to do it in an ordinary way.

[00:03:09.640] – Steve
I’m really glad to have you label that because frequently, secondary teachers share with me the overwhelmingness. I’m afraid too often, put it aside as something that can’t be done instead of looking at an alternative way to do it.

[00:03:32.940] – Tim
And that doesn’t take the place of…I try to physically interact with kids and talk with them and, “Hey, nice shoes. What’s that book you’re reading?” Those kind of things. But if you’re lucky, you might be able to, if you’re doing it purposeful, maybe hit 20-25% of the kids every day. But this way, I can hit 100% of the kids once a week, like I said, in just a way that is just not possible.

[00:03:54.840] – Steve
Well, talk to us about some of the ways that you do this. In your article – and by the way, we’ll make sure that your article gets tied in with a link here so that people can go find it, but you mentioned several different strategies that you use. So you want to walk us through a couple of those?

[00:04:14.680] – Tim
Yeah. And it’s cool to write articles for Edutopia because technically, you get paid by George Lucas. So as a giant nerd myself, it’s a neat thing.

[00:04:25.165] – Steve
[laughter]

[00:04:25.480] – Tim
And I say this all the time when I work with teachers – if we don’t share what we’re doing in our classrooms, it’s not bragging, but we’re letting others control the conversation about education. And so as many times as we can share, that’s a powerful thing to do. So I started doing this. I’ve been around for a while, and I was brought in with the idea of, don’t let them see a smile until Christmas kind of thing. Make them fear you at the beginning of the school year. As the year goes on, you can open up a little bit more, all those kinds of things. And I wish I could go back and change all that for maybe the first 10 years or so as I was teaching. Not that I wasn’t kind and things like that, but I had never really taken the human aspect with this. And so at the end of the school year, I would always show this great video, and that’s in the article. The gentleman’s name is Rick Rigsby, “Lessons From a Third-grade Dropout.”

[00:05:16.370] – Tim
And he talks about how his father was, quote, unquote, only a third-grade student, and then he dropped out of school. But it’s all about what his father taught him and how to overcome these obstacles in life and all these things. And it focuses on making making as much of an impact on this life as you can while you’re here. At the end of the year, you know the kids. It’s great. It’s easy to do. I’m a giant introvert. But by the end of the year, you build your small family there. And then one year, my students made me promise to begin the school year with this video and the discussion. And so I did. And it was a terrifying experience to open up when I don’t know these kids. I have anxiety, I have depression. I talk very openly with the kids about this and as an introvert. But then we also talk about not letting these things get in your way. And so for me, that video is a way to open up those conversations. I would always give that get to know me survey at the beginning of the year. What books do you like to read?

[00:06:18.420] – Tim
Where are you into? All those things that we do as teachers. Then you read through it, and then you put it in your binder and you forget about it. Now, I do it about once every two weeks. I change up the questions, and I tie it into current events. In the video, like I said, he focuses very much on how you live in. That’s the title of my survey. It’s just how you live in. It might be as simple as watch a short five-minute video about the news, give me some feedback about it, and then honestly, just, how are you doing? What’s going on this week? Sometimes it’s as simple as that. Other times, I might throw at them a six or seven question survey, and it might be things like, towards the end of a marking period or when there’s midterms, and I’ll say things like, what are your major obstacles to finding success in school this year? It’s not just about my classroom. It’s about the holistic approach of everything going on that I’m finding out. Because in a high school, you’re not on a team. There’s days go by where I don’t really talk to other adults in the building because we don’t interact as much.

[00:07:24.640] – Tim
It gives me a peek into these other classrooms. Then I’ll say things like, another And the question is, what do you need the most help with? And it doesn’t have to be with school. It could be with time management. It could be with studying, it could be with another teacher, it could be with my classroom. And then I ask, and this is always a hard one for them, “Where are you finding your greatest success in school right now?” And for them, they’re so used to, “Oh, I only got this grade, and I only got that grade…” Forcing them to talk about what they’re doing that they’re successful at. And so when I give grades out, I can’t get to see a D, even an F. I always find something in their work that was done well. I’ll put stickers on their work and things like that. They’re not just that grade. Also in the survey, I’ll ask, “What is the one thing that you wish that I, as your teacher, knew about you?” That can be anything from, they might answer something silly to it might be something really serious, it might be something that they’re really…they want to have a chance to share, but they’re too shy to share in class.

[00:08:20.600] – Tim
And so it gives them that voice with me. And then I’ll ask, “Reflect on our class this year. “How are we,”and that’s really important – “how are we doing? Not just you as a student, but how am I doing as a teacher? What’s working? What’s not working?” I’ve been teaching long enough that I’m okay with stopping a lesson right smack in the middle of it if it’s not working. And if there’s a principal in the room, it doesn’t phase me no least. I think that’s an important piece of education is that I fail, too, as a teacher. That’s also being human. “What’s a goal you have set for yourself this year?” It might have nothing to do with school. It might have to do… I’ve heard about weight lifting. I’ve heard about wrestling, swimming times. I’ve heard about marathons. I’ve heard about entering into contests. I’ve heard about all kinds of neat things that the kids are doing outside of my classroom. And by the way, this helps a lot when I write college recommendations as well, because I’m not just writing about grades and things.

[00:09:22.240] – Tim
And then the only other one that I really change up with is, and I found a lot of value in this because I got really upset, you give the kids a lot of feedback, you give them an assignment, and some of the kids look at it, and then they throw it in their bag or they never look at it. I don’t give them a grade for major assignments. They have to grade themselves. And so part of that survey is, what did you do well? What do you need to work on? Those kinds of questions. So that they’re forced to use specific evidence, textual evidence, high school teacher, from my feedback. And then they get to share what they did well, what they need to work on. They pair share with a partner, and then they have to grade themselves. And usually I find the students grade themselves way too harshly. They’re way too hard on themselves. And it’s really neat to say they grade themselves, and I gave myself a B or a C. I’m like, oh, no, actually, this is the grade I’m going to give you. And so then you see them puff up, you see them to be very proud of themselves, and it makes them part of the process rather than just they come in, there’s an assignment on their desk, and then you just teach.

[00:10:27.260] – Tim
It’s a lot different to have them part the conversation.

[00:10:31.400] – Steve
Wow. You’ve pumped a whole bunch of things out here for me to follow.

[00:10:36.100] – Tim
Sorry.

[00:10:36.900] – Steve
No, I’m really glad. The first one I got to tell you is the timing is very interesting because I’m working with three different schools currently with teachers taking a look at feedback to students on work and that issue that kids don’t pay any attention to graded feedback is one of the first ones that that we jump into. I’m wondering, because you’re surveying the kids and getting their input along the way, I wonder when you bring that around to an assignment where you’re asking them to give their assessment of their work, whether they jump into that a little better than students would if a teacher just begins with asking them to look at their work and and figure out the feedback they got from the teacher.

[00:11:33.180] – Tim
Yeah, that’s an important piece of it. I think COVID really brought this home for me because even though my kids were at home and on the computers, we had already built this community, and so we were still able to maintain those relationships even that was on the screen. The way that I do this, I don’t know if I said this in the beginning, but we have Schoology for our learning platform, whatever you might have, chalkboard, whatever. But they submit this in writing digitally. Most of the things I do in my classroom does not involve computers, but in this case, I do. It’s just the kids get used to it. It’s part of the pattern. It’s nothing new for them. But you’re right, because in the beginning of the year, it’s funny when you look because their get to know me survey in the beginning of the year, really short answers because here’s this old guy up in front of the room. I don’t know who he is. But by this time in the year now, the answers I’m getting, wow, that I just I would never have gotten at the beginning of the year. And then they continue I need to get deeper and deeper and deeper as the course of the year goes.

[00:12:32.640] – Tim
And there’s some kids that will never go beyond a couple of words, and they don’t feel comfortable sharing a whole lot. And that’s fine, too. It’s not a forced therapy session. That’s not what I’m here for.

[00:12:44.760] – Steve
That probably tells you something as well, though.

[00:12:47.120] – Tim
Yeah, I agree.

[00:12:48.280] – Steve
The degree of what they share with you. Well, listening to you now, you triggered another piece that I had written down here. And it sounds like there’s some risk-taking and vulnerability that’s necessary. I think I heard you say you model that. Then I’m guessing as the time goes on, students become more and more comfortable taking that risk and being vulnerable in their responses to you.

[00:13:13.840] – Tim
Yeah. I just got a note in my mailbox to start today on Monday, and it was a note from a student. And you get a handwritten note from a teenager like, wow. But the gist of it at the end, she said this one sentence of, “Thank you so much for sharing about your vulnerabilities and some of the struggles in your life, I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one.” And that, yes, I want them to write five paragraph essays and research papers, and I want them to know about our government and question things and be civically engaged. But I also want them to know that they’re a human being and that they’re seen.

[00:13:46.900] – Steve
Yeah, powerful. The other one, I’ll stick this in for the listeners, a resource. But I’ve pointed people a couple of times to a piece, a presentation from Search Institute that looks at student relationships. They have something that they call the 4S’s interview. That the teacher working, especially looking at a student who’s struggling, or the teacher has questions about them, but they talk about uncovering the student’s four S’s. The four S’s are: Sparks, strengths, struggles, and supports. The spark is, what’s your passion? What are you interested? What do you see as your strengths? What do you see as your struggles? Then what are the places or the people who support you? As I was listening to you go through the various questions you’re asking kids, it sounded to me like all four of those are likely to pop up at some time.

[00:15:02.380] – Tim
Yeah, I like that, though, that idea of, like Mr. Rogers would say, “look for the helpers.” I like that. I might actually work that into my surveys. Who’s that around you? Who’s helping you? I love that.

[00:15:12.600] – Steve
Yeah. Because if a kid says nobody, then you know you got one you really need to zero in on.

[00:15:22.040] – Tim
Yeah.

[00:15:23.240] – Steve
I touch on that when I work with high schools looking at advisor advisee programs. We’re a teacher serving as an advisor to a group of kids. I share that you don’t have to be the kid’s person, but you need to know who that is. If you know the kid is into baseball and they got this connection with their coach, and you know that if a problem comes up, that’s the person you can turn to. But if what you uncover is that a kid has nobody, then as an advisor, that comes a spot where you really got to look at how zero in.

[00:16:01.320] – Tim
Yeah. We do a lot of mentor relationships as well. A lot of times the kids will sign up for it on their own, and they give a listing of their different interests and things, and we try to match adults with them. It’s a really, really powerful experience. On top of everything else that we have to do as educators, but there’s certain things that are just more important.

[00:16:20.980] – Steve
Bingo, bingo, bingo. Actually, that takes me into my next question then. I frequently I’ll really talk when you’re asking people to look at something that they might do in their teaching, what I call the cost-benefit link. If you’re going to take this on to make this change in your teaching, what’s it going to cost you to do it? And then you’re weighing that cost against the benefit. I’m wondering, as you look at the work that you’re doing here, what do you see as the cost? I know that you’re reading that the benefits are outweighing the cost to you.

[00:17:04.000] – Tim
Most days. It can be a lot. For one thing, if you’re asking the kids to share information with you, you can’t look at that a week later. It’s got to be that day. They might be sharing about a sports game over the weekend. They might be sharing something that they’re stressed out about. You got to set other things aside when you put those whatever is out there. If you let it go a week, the kids are not going to buy in anymore. Sometimes I’ve had to get kids some serious help. You don’t want a kid walking out the door on Friday and they say something that needs to be addressed. Sometimes we’ve had to do that. There’s that. It’s an emotional toll. They talk a lot about that in education that we’ve got. I forget what it’s called, but we have that secondary stressors coming from the kids. I my own children at home, too, and those stressors and things. If you’re just getting your feet on the ground, and I’m a mentor to new teachers as well, and maybe this is not something that you get as involved in. Maybe it’s something a lot simpler in terms of just ask the kids, say, “Hey, what’s something going on this week?”

[00:18:17.250] – Tim
Maybe not make it on that deep of a level if you’re not prepared for that. Because if you’re not prepared to respond, you’re going to break that trust with the kids. I say all the time, you can be a well-meaning teacher, but if you’re not prepared for things, things to have certain conversations, you could actually do more harm. So this is something that, again, I’ve been teaching for a long time now. I would not have done my first couple of years unless I had somebody else to talk to who’s had this experience. I could share those kinds of things with me. But yeah, in terms of the benefits, it reminds me on a weekly basis why I’m a teacher. It reminds me and lets me connect with these kids and the laughter. And I have best piece of advice I ever got was to have a good news binder when I first started teaching and now I have multiple binders. And so a lot of these things I will print out, the cards, the emails, the things that we forget about because teachers are really hard on ourselves. And if something goes wrong, it can ruin my entire day or week or what have you.

[00:19:15.180] – Tim
But I’ll go home and I’ll flip through that good news binder. And so for me, it’s not just about saving the kids. It’s literally also saves me, too.

[00:19:24.000] – Steve
Wow. I hadn’t thought about the benefit that way. I think compassion fatigue is what you were – is that the phrase?

[00:19:33.260] – Tim
Yeah. Compassion fatigue.

[00:19:34.970] – Steve
This is actually an antidote to compassion fatigue. You’re seeing the payoff and the benefits from that stress that comes from tying into the lives of the kids.

[00:19:49.920] – Tim
Yeah. It also opens up the conversation that their teachers are people, too, and their principals, and their guidance counselor. Everybody in that building is going through something every day. I think if we see the world that way, it changes the way we react, because a lot of times those negative interactions really have very little to do with me and that child. It has to do with external type things. This has helped me to be much more understanding of that.

[00:20:18.880] – Steve
Early on, you used the word human, and that’s powerful. Let’s find out one new piece about you. When I went to your website and I saw that you were called, The History Comic, was it?

[00:20:35.200] – Tim
Yeah, on social media, that’s me, History Comics. And my email is historycomicsguy. And I always say I should switch my legal name to That Comic Guy, but yeah.

[00:20:44.400] – Steve
Tell us a little bit about that.

[00:20:46.940] – Tim
So this all came hand in hand. I had years ago, long story short, was on my way out of teaching. It was an awful year. It had nothing to do with what was going on in my classroom. And I started looking around for who knows what else I was going to do. And I realized if I was at that point, then I want to teach the way that I want to teach. And I’d never brought in… I’m a rule follower. I never brought in hip hop. I never brought in comics, those kinds of things. And when I started to, I had students who reacted in ways that just opened up the door. The nerds like I was in school that didn’t have an outlet. And here’s this old white guy talking about hip hop. Just staying relevant with the kids. And I just started doing my thing. I started writing articles for PBS News Hour. I traveled around the country, and I present at comic cons and libraries. I do professional development for school districts. I’ve taught at the University of Pennsylvania. I worked for the US State Department. We did work across the world on comics and education and things.

[00:21:50.440] – Tim
If nothing else, I would say, find that thing that you’re passionate about as a teacher. If you can bring that into your classroom, it changes everything. It really made me fall in love with teaching all over again. My administration, my district has been very supportive, and I do my thing. Yes, we do everything else. I’m a very challenging teacher. You can ask my kids, they’ll tell you that. But because I’m passionate about things, they’re passionate about things, and you put it all together, and it’s really been cool.

[00:22:20.600] – Steve
Well, this has just been great, Tim. What’s the best way for listeners to get back in touch with you or follow up if they have a question?

[00:22:30.400] – Tim
My website, probably the easiest thing is teachingwithcomics.com. You can reach out to me there. I’ve got lots of free lesson plans and ideas and resources and all that stuff that’s there. I would say just start there. That’s an easy thing to do. I’m always happy to talk to people about these types of things.

[00:22:48.620] – Steve
We’ll make that happen. Thanks so much.

[00:22:51.620] – Tim
Thank you, Steve. A really great conversation.

[00:22:55.700] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.

Podcast: Knowing Students Builds Connections