Don’t make the mistake of ignoring student feedback in curriculum reviews

We hand year 11 and 12 students the syllabus. “This is the most important document for this subject,” we say. If we expect students to eat, breathe and live the syllabus, shouldn’t they also have a say when it comes time to review it?

The NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) is doing a wholesale review of its Stage 6 (year 11 and 12) courses. Teachers and industry will be carefully crafting submissions.

Students, the party with the most skin on this game, won’t be doing the same. But they should have their voice heard.

Ask any year 12 graduate about their syllabi and you’ll have to put a time limit on the conversation. They’ve got a litany of complaints and suggestions; many of which would improve the experience of students studying a subject. Which, if implemented, could motivate them to recommend the course to a peer.

There’s no point asking year 12 graduates to write formal submissions. Instead, what about focus groups or online surveys, with participants facilitated by schools?

Senior syllabi are packed. As an NSW Economics teacher, I would consistently struggle to complete the course to an in-depth level on time. If I felt this pressure, how might students feel as time marched on and dot points remained to do?

When it comes to the syllabus, Let’s hear from the students. And let’s hear from as many as possible — public/private, rural/metro, single sex and coed. The more voices, the better.

Don't worry about your first class. Worry about your first five classes

The first lesson with a new high school class — particularly at a new school — can be nerve wracking. There’s potentially a lot of pressure to ‘get it right’ and ‘set the tone’. My view: don’t worry about getting the first lesson perfect. Instead, have a great plan of attack for the first few classes.

There are so many things to establish when you get a new class. You need to introduce yourself, set behaviour and homework expectations, talk about the content you’ll be working on (and the assessments), learn students’ names and learning tendencies…

It’s a big ask. 

There’s a quote I think about a lot. I heard it from Tony Robbins, but the quote has many authors. The quote goes something like: “people overestimate how much they can achieve in one year, but underestimate how much they can achieve in five years”. 

We can apply this to a new class. It’s challenging to do a lot in class one …but by the end of class five or 10, things can become clearer and patterns more established.

A unifying principle

My goal for the first few classes is to establish myself as an organised and approachable teacher. 

What does being organised mean? I’ve got a plan and I’m working hard to make the class run as smoothly as possible. I’ve got the materials I need. The learning management system (LMS) is setup and regularly updated, including with details of the assessment tasks.

What does being approachable mean? I’m greeting students as they arrive and doing my best to learn about their individual interests. I’ll answer your questions and, if I don’t have the answers, I’ll make a note and follow this up. I’m going to smile and make jokes. I don’t subscribe to the “don’t smile until Easter” theory. 

The first class

My expectations are relatively low for the first class. It’s a new group of students, potentially all unknown, at the start of a fresh school year. 

I’m going to settle the class, welcome everyone and mark the roll. There’s no need for students to go around and introduce themselves. They either know each other or are going to be around each other all day every day. I don’t give students a questionnaire to fill out — I’ll learn about them as the term/year progresses.

I’ll introduce the content for the term and outline the assessment task. We’ll then check out the LMS and do a short activity — tangentially related to the content, definitely engaging — and submit our work on the LMS.

And that’s it. Over the next few classes, we’ll start on the class content. I’ll also get into behaviour and homework expectations, and the consequences of not meeting these.  

But don’t you need to do more in the first class?

After all, doesn’t the first class set the tone?

The first class sets a tone. It doesn’t set the tone. I can always course correct if the class is going off the rails. 

I once had a Year 9/10 class that was very large and very messy. I did a hard reset. I imposed a seating plan. I wrote up more detailed behavioural expectations and printed these out for students. I sent an email home detailing the issues with the class and the steps I’d taken, as well as the consequences for misbehaviour.

You can always take steps to set a new tone. Just ‘tone down’ the importance of the very first class.

Which subject should you pick? First, look at who's teaching it.

During subject selection, students are often told not to select subjects based on the teacher. I can see the logic. If you choose a subject based on the teacher, and then the teacher changes or leaves, what happens then? Still, I think students should pick subjects based on the teacher.

Here’s my logic.

Students look forward to going to class for a teacher they like. Students will listen to a teacher they like. Students will always… Let me try that again. Students can be more likely to do assigned tasks, and go above and beyond for a teacher they like. 

If this argument doesn’t resonate, then flip the situation. How do students perform for teachers they don’t click with?

But what happens if the teacher leaves?

Let’s tackle the key issue here: what happens if the liked teacher moves on? Not an ideal situation but one that’s replicated across so many aspects of life. You take a job based on your potential colleagues, you start, then over time those people leave. How do you respond? Or you invest in a company based on the charismatic CEO and enviable investment returns. The CEO moves on — how do you respond?

It’s like a starting point for decision-making more broadly. You make a decision based on the best available information. Here, you want to study with a specific teacher. If the teacher leaves, you may need to adjust. Maybe you end up dropping the subject; maybe you’re able to take up some private tutoring; maybe you work more closely with a trusted classmate. But you had that time with the respected teacher.

And this can be an incredibly beneficial experience. A liked teacher has the power to encourage students to explore new subjects and interests. I think of my own situation where the economics teacher suggested I study her subject. I appreciated that personal approach and, honestly, the decision to study economics in high school has helped shaped my career more than any other single decision.

This can all be tricky in larger schools

A complicating factor is the experience in bigger schools where many teachers take the same subject. Here, it’s very difficult to guarantee which teacher would have an individual student. In terms of my point, I’m thinking about schools where senior subjects can have only one or two specialist teachers — particularly for a subject like economics.

You’re not perfect. So why pretend to be a perfect teacher?

As a student teacher, new teacher or an experienced teacher at a new school, you might feel the pressure to present a highly polished image.

I suggest you leave this polished image behind. 

Think about it this way. You’ve been (and may still be) a student. Part of being a student is experiencing frustrations, disappointments and the occasional success. You might have even made mistakes — potentially some very notable ones.

Embrace this reality and leave the highly polished image behind. 

In the classroom you can do this by sharing your mistakes with students. In my opinion, great teachers discuss their own mistakes during student interactions. When you’re working with students think about using language such as:

• “When I did questions like this, here are the typical mistakes I made…”

• “This is the strategy I used to deal with questions like this. It wasn’t very successful. What I did instead was…”

• “I didn’t do as well as I wanted to do on a task like this. This was what I did next…”

From a pedagogy perspective, I reckon you’re demonstrating two valuable teaching traits.

1. You’re modelling good practice. You’re demonstrating the importance of understanding your mistakes and using this information to improve. 

2. You’re building relationships with students. You’re being honest with your students and discussing your own personal challenges, in a way that’s relevant to them. Hopefully you’re doing this with a good sense of humour.

Your imperfection can be a terrific tool in building rapport with students and helping them view their mistakes in a more positive light.

You should (consider) changing your multiple choice answers

I vividly remember teacher after teacher telling me DON’T change my multi choice answers.

“Your first answer is most likely the most correct,” I heard their collective voices say.

You may have heard some similar advice. But what if this piece of conventional advice is wrong? What if we should think again about changing our minds — with multis and life in general?

This is the premise of a book by Adam Grant, an organisational psychologist, a bit of a rock star academic, who has best selling books, popular TED talks and a large following.

Grant has written a book titled Think Again. The tag line: “Discover how rethinking can lead to excellence at work and wisdom in life.”

Another few choice quotes: 

• “Embrace the joy of being wrong”

• “You don’t have to believe everything you think”.

The reason the book stood out to me is because Grant has a section in the prologue focused on multiple choice questions. He discusses the conventional belief about not changing your first answers and then offers two contrary views.

First, he discusses that when a group of psychologists reviewed thirty‑three studies, “they found that in every one, the majority of answer revisions were from wrong to right”. 

Second, he talks about how psychologists counted eraser marks on the exams of more than 1,500 students in Illinois. Only a quarter of the changes were from right to wrong, while half were from wrong to right. 

So, what should you take from this? 

Let’s start with something you should avoid: don’t second guess yourself as you go through the multis in an exam. Annotate the questions, eliminate the least likely and go for the most correct response (based on the key words of the question).

Here’s something you can apply from Grant’s work. When you are reviewing your multi choice answers, consider changing your response. Consider the fact that you may have another look, ‘think again’, and discover a more correct response. This is an acceptable strategy and, as the research shows, it can be an effective one.

Also, I suggest reading the whole book. It’s a really interesting read with lots of great real-world examples. Adam Grant’s book always make me feel wicked smart. Also, check out my video on the topic below.

Try a little patience

Classes can be very loud and excitable places. They can be boisterous and lively. They can involve students talking on top of each other, eager to share their thoughts. Sometimes loud is good. Other times loud can preclude thinking. 

The problem here is that if students are focused on speaking and sharing, in an almost, competitive sense, it can preclude thinking. And, as Ron Ritchhart* says, “learning is a consequence of thinking” (Creating Cultures of Thinking, 2015, p. 102). 

I’ve posed questions to a class, gotten ‘engagement’ (measured by noise? Hands?) and assumed learning has taken place. But think about who contributes in class. It’s not everyone. Even if someone puts up their hand, or yells a comment, will their contribution be acknowledged, incorporated or developed? Thinking is not guaranteed.

“As a teacher, I need to create more opportunities for students to think and less for them to appear ‘engaged’. How do we do this? One way is to give students quality wait time.”

You’re probably familiar with the concept of ‘wait time’, of giving students time to think and then thoughtfully respond...rather than rushing in with their first, sometimes undeveloped thoughts. I think we should expand on this idea and give students quality wait time. 

Here’s what this could look like. First, the teacher clearly poses a series of questions. These are written down so students can see them (rather than just hear them), annotate them and engage with them. Second, the teacher asks students to work, individually, through the questions. Third, students are asked to share their responses with a classmate and add to their work. This collective work is then shared with the class.

A couple of other things to note. One, this process takes time. It’s not a case of asking “What is X?”, getting a few hands and responses, then moving on. Two, this process can be challenging. Students need to work individually and potentially struggle. This is deliberate and valuable. Let’s not rush to offer the answers here. Finally, all students have to share their thoughts, even just to a partner. They can’t duck the discussion.

Here’s a quick example. Students have had homework on tariffs, including definitions and drawing graphs. In class, I could ask questions out loud like:

-What is a tariff?

-What does a tariff look like?

-How do we calculate government revenue after the imposition of a tariff?

But not everyone will contribute. Not everyone will undertake thinking and participate in learning. Instead, pose these as written questions. Have students work individually, then pair up. Then open it up to the class. See if there’s a difference.

Be patient with the use of quality wait time.

*Ron Ritchhart is a Senior Research Associate at Harvard Project Zero and a pioneer in having students make their thinking visible. You should definitely check his work out. There’s a great chapter discussing wait time in the book linked above.