End Course Feedback - Section Beta

As a teacher, I have always valued feedback - I have written about how I used feedback during my 3 years of teaching in Pune in this post on instructional practices and also in earlier posts of this series. I firmly believe that feedback from my students provides useful insights into how I can improve as a teacher while keeping a two-way channel of communication open. It also conveys to them that I value their opinion and that I shouldn't be put on a pedestal simply because I am the teacher.

The last 15 minutes of our final session (discussed in the previous post) was dedicated to my students filling out end course feedback forms. I designed these forms (3 pages) to have a mix of rating questions and free response type questions. My only request of the kids was that they be as sincere, critical and honest as possible!

Below are some snapshots of the feedback; once again, I would recommend reading this post on a device with a big screen to easily read the students' feedback.

It is heartening that children noticed and mentioned how much I enjoyed teaching and working with them during the course. They realised that I was pushing their thinking to help them get more out of the course. It was also a bit meta that one student wrote, on the feedback form, that she liked the idea of feedback forms! 😄

Some of the responses on their overall experience and the ways they would like to improve the course are shown below. These proved to be exceptionally helpful when planning changes for the Alpha and Gamma sections. Note that, at the time of writing this post, I have finished the course with Alpha too and I'll write more about that in my next post.

A common point raised in the feedback was that I could have given them actual matchsticks during the quiz show (refer this post). My students felt that bringing this hands-on lens to the activity would have made it a better experience for them. With this in mind, I purchased a box of toothpicks (to substitute matchsticks) and used it when I conducted the quiz show for the Alpha section.

Another piece of feedback was bittersweet - the children enjoyed the course but would have liked it to be longer so that we could have done more logical thinking puzzles. I see this as a program limitation as the students were studying a total of 7 courses (~50 hours total) over the two weeks and each course had to be worked into a tightly packed timetable. Perhaps, if I get an opportunity to take this course again, I will push for a longer course.

In the first of the three images above, the child mentioned a Puzzle Booklet - I had curated a set of ~25 puzzles from different sources that required logical reasoning and thinking skills to solve them and gave each child a spiral bound booklet for them to try at home or after the course. We did not discuss these during class; however, children were free to talk to me about the puzzles in the booklet during breakfast and lunch. Thus, I spent many meals in animated conversation with one or more children on any puzzle that had them stumped! 😊

On the whole, it was great to see kids gradually understand the value of thinking logically as opposed to adopting random strategies or resorting to guesswork. Many of them realised that persistence and patience were key and that strategies may not always strike them immediately. Finally, some of them mentioned how working in teams and discussing strategies pushed them to think more deeply about how they were approaching the puzzle.

In the next post, I will share the tweaks I made while teaching Alpha based on the Beta section feedback and other factors like logistics.