TEACHER  DEVELOPMENT

End-of-Year Questions to Help You Get Ready for Next Year

26 May 2018/ By Zineb DJOUB

The end of the school or college year! It is time to reflect, learn more, and get ready for next year. You may be wondering how to start the process and set up yourself for success now. Here are 40 end-of-year questions along with a set of instructions that can support you in reflecting and making proper decisions to enhance your teaching, assessment, and development in the profession.

Depending on your needs and interests, you can select the questions that you see more relevant and plan to achieve your goals. So, grab a pen and paper and start planning for your SUCCESS.

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End-of-year questions about your teaching

1. What teaching materials, approaches, or activities do you want to experiment with next year?
   You may be interested in flipping the classroom, trying new digital tools, new games, and activities….it is something new. So, go for it, plan, and make decisions to integrate it more effectively. Never hesitate! You may be fascinated by the result.
2. What do you need to improve in your teaching?
   Reflect on your practices and decide what to review. Is it your teaching content, approach, the language used to explain, the activities, your lesson plan, the materials, etc? Change may be driven by your intent to achieve flexibility and/or enhance your practices.
3. What kind of skills do you have to focus on?
   This depends on the subject matter you are teaching and the deficits you might have observed among your students. If you are a language teacher, you may focus on integrating the four skills (Reading, listening, speaking, writing) in your course or improving this process.
4. What to do to align more your instructions with your students’ needs?
   Teacher flexibility is a must. You may think about weaning yourself away from the coursebook, offering a range of activities, varying the format of questions, etc. Think always about variety in providing input and activities to make your teaching more relevant to students’ needs and interests.
5. How to plan more effectively for the unexpected?
   Your students may find an activity boring, an activity may take more or less time than anticipated, technology may fail, etc. So despite planning, unforeseen problems often occur. Reflect on your experience and ask yourself “To what extent am I able to deal with the unexpected in my classroom?” If you see that you need to develop or enhance this ability, plan strategies (learn and try others) for overcoming unforeseen problems.
6. What kind of questions (or what other questions) do you need to ask to provoke your students’ thinking?
   To shift from shallow to deeper learning approaches, you need to evaluate the kind of questions you are addressing to make your teaching thought-provoking. So, think about other questions that make students think, generate debate, solve problems, etc.
7. What kind of activities would support your students’ engagement in the classroom? Students’ engagement is more than mere participation or involvement. It is risk-taking, initiating, and being motivated to contribute to the teaching-learning process. Think about how to create an active learning environment where in-the-flow moments are more common.
8. What kind of follow-up tasks can engage your students outside the classroom?
   Besides reviewing and consolidating the material covered in class, follow-up tasks can also be a source of engagement for your students. So, think about assigning different types of activities (variety) that are of interest to your students, and meanwhile relevant to their own needs. Also, opt for activities that provide more opportunities for self-directed learning (For example, students collaborating on a research topic they have selected, making their research plan, collecting data and reporting results).
9. What kind of choice or decision-making is required to support your students in developing self-directed learning?
   You may have provided students with the choice to select learning resources and/or assess themselves. Think about other choices and remember that the more choices you provide, the better you will enhance students’ ownership over their learning process. To learn more about how to provide opportunities for your students’ choice and voice here are three interesting resources to explore: 1) Empower: What Happens When Students Own Their Learning, 2) Teach Like a PIRATE: Increase Student Engagement, Boost Your Creativity, and Transform Your Life as an Educator and   3) Teaching College: The Ultimate Guide to Lecturing, Presenting, and Engaging Students (if you are a college teacher).
10. How can you obtain feedback about your teaching? You need to define the tools that can help you get more information about your teaching so that you can evaluate it, besides deciding the people who will contribute to the process, i.e., your students, colleagues, etc. Think about designing them (observation checklists, questionnaires, etc.) or improving those you are already using in case you see the need for that.

End-of-year questions about your classroom management

1. What kind of disruption have you experienced?
   Making a lot of noise, throwing chairs through windows, texting, chewing gum……whatever kind of disruption you have experienced it is time to settle it down. Reflect on the kind of disruption you have faced, and the way you have handled it, and ask yourself about the reason why it has emerged in your classes.
2. How should you plan to deal with it more effectively next year?
   Learn about the strategies to overcome them and plan how you need to adapt them to your context.
3. What kind of interaction is mostly dominating your classroom?
   Try to remember the way you were often interacting with your students this year. Was it teacher-students, students-teachers, students-students? etc.
4. How would you vary interaction patterns?
   Think about the different interaction patterns, what activities support them and how you need to use them in your lessons to support students’ learning.
5. What kind of seating arrangement do you need to focus on?
   You need to provide more physical flexibility for your students to make space for personalized learning (independent work, collaborative work, mini-lessons, large group discussions).
6. What do you need to improve in your interaction with your students?
   Is it your eye contact, talking time, feedback, the way you greet your students, start the lessons, etc.? In deciding what to improve you will also think about what to avoid.
7. How can you support students’ peer relationships?
   Think about creating an inclusive environment where students can collaborate, support, and encourage each other.
8. How should you manage time more effectively?
   Are you making effective use of classroom time so that your students do not feel bored? Think about your timing, and how you should improve it more.
9. How to be better organized?
   Think about the moments when you felt exhausted or faced an awkward situation because you were not organized enough to avoid it. So, decide what to organize (homework, tests, students’ participation in class, etc.) and have systems that work. For instance, record the homework set and make a note on the day that it is due, this will help you remember what each class is meant to be doing.
10. Do you need to change the way your classroom is decorated?
    If your answer is ‘yes, reflect on how to make the classroom’s visual environment a source of students’ creativity and learning, read and learn more about it.

Interested in developing more skills in managing your classroom? Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College provides techniques for managing effectively classrooms and inspiring students’ engagement. 

End-of-year questions about your assessment practices

1. How should you engage students in understanding the assessment criteria?
   For both summative and formative assessment, it is necessary to rethink the way you are defining quality performance, setting the criteria, and engaging your students in understanding them. Are you going to use rubrics, models of strong and weak work related to problems that most concern your students, workshops, etc?
2. How would you assess your students formatively?
   Are you going to try out other assessment tools (or another alternative) to obtain information continuously about your students’ learning? Keep in mind the intended learning outcomes and your students’ needs when making such a decision and try to align it with your instructions.
3. How to encourage your students’ involvement in the assessment process?
   Think about what assessment decisions you need to share with your students and how to support them in tracking their own progress and reflecting on their learning needs and wants.
4. How to prepare your students better for exams?
   Such a process requires determining the exam strategies you need to focus on based on your previous experience (planning for revision, managing exam time, etc.), thinking about how to develop them, maintaining students’ motivation, and encouraging them to make efforts to overcome their exam anxiety and succeed.
5. How would you enhance your feedback quality for both summative and formative assessment?
   Remember feedback is your responsibility, it can either detriment or boost students’ learning. So, reflect on your feedback (the language used, the kind of comments, the way mistakes and errors are highlighted, etc.), and ask yourself if it is understandable, linked to the assignment’s purpose and criteria, and whether it supports students’ learning, then make decisions to improve it.
6. How would you enhance your feedback quantity and timing?
   Since students are expected to learn from your feedback, you also need to rethink your feedback quantity and timing. Is it sufficient and provided quickly enough to be useful to students?
7. How would you communicate feedback?
   Decide if you maintain or change the way you are articulating information about students’ performances. Do you need to schedule discussion sessions (in case you are not) or is it enough to talk it over in class? Should you talk one-on-one or in groups? How much time would you devote to the process? etc.
8. How would you support students to work out your feedback and learn?
   The quality of students’ engagement with teacher feedback must be the concern of every teacher. So, think about how to involve your students in interpreting, reflecting, and acting upon feedback comments (For example, what questions to address, the format and content of reflective worksheets), how to train them in processing feedback, whether to use peer feedback to support the achievement of this goal, etc.
9. How to align your formative and summative assessment?
   Both assessment approaches need to reinforce each other and assess what needs to be assessed (learning objectives). So, think about how to balance formative and summative students’ learning/ achievement information.
10. How would you evaluate your assessment process? You may need to develop a new self-evaluation tool that can support you reflect better the quality of your assessment practices.

End-of-year questions about your development as a Teacher

Professional development

1. What kind of skills do you need to develop?
   You may want to develop your organizational skills, presentation skills, technology integration, ability to deal with conflict, etc. Think about what you need to improve in your teaching and make your list.
2. Why do you think you need to develop them?
   Ask yourself how developing such skills would support your students to learn. This can clarify their purpose and relevance to your course and thus motivate you to pursue your goal.
3. How would you plan to achieve this goal?
   After setting your goals, i.e., what professional skills to develop, design your own plan indicating the professional development activities that are feasible and important for you (conferences, workshops, programmes, action research, etc.), whether they involve collaborative and/or individual learning, the required resources to pursue these activities (books, websites, software, etc.) and a time frame for completing them.

Social and personal development

1. How would you collaborate more effectively with your colleagues?
   Connecting with colleagues, sharing thoughts, and providing support are necessary to learn from each other and support our students to learn. So, think about how to create successful collaboration with your colleagues by considering your relationships with them (try to build good relationships), deciding what to share and work on, when to collaborate (shared planning time), and how (inside the school or via email, Skype, Google Docs, etc.)
2. How would you partner with students’ parents?
   To improve your communication with parents, think about what effective communication strategies you need to develop (how to introduce yourself to parents, when and how often you contact them, how to clarify information, etc.)
3. How to improve your social networking with people of your interest?
   You may think about networking with more teachers, joining other forums, sharing more comments, blogging, etc.
4. How to balance your personal life and work?
   Think carefully about yourself, your family, and your job. Do you find time for yourself? Your family? Do you feel under pressure? Learn how to organize more your time and prioritize to be good at work-life balance.
5. How to overcome work stress?
   Think about what makes you stressed in your job and learn about the strategies to overcome that stress.
6. How to maintain your motivation?
   Positive emotions are responsible for regaining and maintaining teacher motivation. So, think about what makes you feel good and encourages you to do better.
7. How to reflect effectively on your development?
   Decide when and how this reflection needs to be conducted and seek others’ support to enhance it.

You are tired and you need a source of motivation and inspiration, Jimmy Casa’s book will pep you up: Culturize: Every Student. Every Day. Whatever It Takes.

 

By answering these end-of-year questions and planning for new actions, you will clarify more your objectives and plan to improve more. So, let’s make being innovative, reflective, and targeting our development as teachers the characteristics of next year. If you have other end-of-year questions please share them.