“While it isn’t our place to tell teachers how to do their jobs, if teachers want kids to be successful, the students should have a say,” says Zee Kasian ’26 while reflecting on their high school experience. And the experience is not Zee’s alone; it’s backed by a resounding sentiment from the student body that there is a gap in communication between teachers and students.
ICSD’s annual Goals and Priorities Survey is designed to reflect sentiments like these as data. At the start of the school year, the Board of Education Curriculum Committee met to review the results of the survey. Like years before, there was a notable disconnect between teachers’ goals and perceptions of their classrooms and students’ experiences. Although seventy-eight percent of teachers claimed to create opportunities for students to learn about themselves and others, only twenty percent of students agreed.
While district-wide surveys offer large-scale data on student (dis)satisfaction, they don’t provide any meaningful or practical feedback on what to do better. If we want to bridge the district-wide student-teacher gap, we need to start with a classroom culture of curiosity, collaboration, and feedback. The Tattler Editorial Board encourages all teachers to give their students a variety of platforms to share their perspective and shape their learning.
While there are many ways teachers can and already are incorporating student feedback throughout the district, there is no universal way to collect it. Some teachers give anonymous end-of-year surveys, some append questions to important assignments, some hold discussions about classroom and school policy. Many combine methods, creating unique systems for each class.
However, whichever mechanism a teacher might pick to collect student opinions, it should ensure that students feel safe being honest. Though many students are already able to approach teachers and offer feedback one-on-one, this is often an anxiety-inducing prospect and discourages students from taking initiative when they’re struggling. Even teachers telling their classes that they can approach instructors anytime with feedback or concerns goes a long way in making students feel comfortable voicing their opinion.
At IHS, teachers who already incorporate feedback into their classrooms have found doing so helps them meet their students’ individual and collective needs. David Rosenfeld, an English teacher at the high school, explained that student feedback helps him with everything from getting to know an individual student’s needs better to determining which books to include in next year’s curriculum. Kathryn Cernera, English teacher and Ithaca Teachers’ Association president, explained that quick end-of-unit feedback forms were a common-sense practice when she was teaching, and allowed for students to express concerns without teachers feeling defensive. She emphasized that no matter how long you’ve been teaching or how well you think you know your students, it’s important to ask them for their perspective; it might surprise you.
The Tattler also encourages something like an anonymous Google Form as a straightforward way for any student to share their experiences without fear of backlash. It’s important that feedback forms contain both broad, open-ended questions, and specific questions about things the teacher can easily change. To be most accessible to students, teachers could have a general, open-ended feedback form always available on their Canvas page. Something like an always-available form also helps convey to students that their opinions are genuinely sought after. This then motivates students to give more thought-out, high quality form responses.
Encouragement like this can also be generated through things like whole-class discussions about form responses and policy changes, as well as reasoning about why certain proposals for change are not implementable. By discussing teacher reactions to student feedback, classes can build greater trust around the prospect of giving feedback to begin with.
This culture of connection and trust between teachers and students is already very well implemented at LACS. As Eli Warshof ’29, a former LACS student, puts it, “LACS’s culture overall, more than a single specific ‘form,’ allows for discourse between students, teachers, other staff, and administrators naturally.” Though a lot of things about the nature of the school—size, mission, and curriculum among them—allow for this culture, IHS can still create its own analogous forms of some of the initiatives which cultivate this standard at LACS. For instance, LACS conducts “narrative self-evaluations” every quarter for students to review their own performance and experiences at the school. Though this form is primarily used for students to reflect on their own conduct, it also serves as an important outlet for them to provide feedback for teachers. An equivalent initiative at IHS might simply look like an end-of-quarter reflection for a given class, where space is explicitly held for students to share things which might improve their classroom experience.
The Tattler believes that the best teaching solutions are found in dialogue between teachers and students—discourse on how teachers can improve and what goes into the policies they make. By actively seeking constructive feedback, teachers can build a classroom culture in which teacher and student alike feel compelled to listen, learn, and grow. With feedback, teachers can adapt their teaching to a particular set of students’ needs, building trust and engagement along the way.
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