Giving students a voice will help you improve your teaching. Yes, teachers have a set curriculum to teach and have specific targets that need to be met, but what if our curriculum was influenced by the children themselves? What if we used their innate curiosity to help form our curriculum in certain areas? I wonder what teaching and learning would be like then?

Personally, I am incredibly interested in finding out what they think. I value their thoughts and opinions and I think it’s important that we as educators listen to them. With this mindset, I set out to try and find out about what they would like to learn more of, what would they like us to do more or less in lessons and how they feel I could improve my teaching practice to help them learn.

I handed out the following questionnaire ( Edutopia questionnaire here) which was optional and upon its completion could be handed back to me anonymously. The majority of the children were wager to fill it in and some left theirs anonymous, others wrote their names. After I collected them all and went through them, I found some of my pupils’ answers surprising and some certainly helped me change my lessons to cater for specific requests. I am looking for better questionnaires and I feel if I was to do this again I would probably create my own.

As adults we often tend to dismiss children’s voices. I say hear them out, I bet you will be surprised!

Like and share if you feel the same.

Till next time…

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash