Feedback is how you know an adventure is complete. Even if it is in stages. I love feedback, specifically, I love critical feedback. I often will immediately scour through my surveys at the end of the year and look for areas that need improvement. I always feel warm and fuzzy from a child’s comment about me being nice, awesome, or their favorite teacher. That is the ultimate compliment. Because that means that I can single-handedly change a student’s day. These comments are on my surveys each year. However, I often find myself looking through the feedback for the points that sting a little or the ways to make my classroom better.

I look for… “It was boring.”

I look for… “I didn’t like when we did…”

I seek out the… “class went so slow when….”

When we stop improving, we stop growing and adapting. Engagement is the ultimate tool for feedback. Because in engagement, resides respect, safety, and compassion. Now, the end of the 2019-2020 school year felt a little different. There were so many variables out of our control as teachers. Just to name a few: Online learning, technology, fear and trauma associated with being quarantined, illness, racial and social disparities, homelessness, students with disabilities and ELLs facing learning from home, and more. Finally, with the protesting in response to the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and more, and the inability to talk about these issues face-to-face, my survey felt superficial. I knew what didn’t go right. But, I knew that the key was to still ask my students what they thought because their opinions matter. I finally got the courage up to look at their responses from the end of the year. This post is a report of my findings of perceptions as to me as a teacher, evaluations of face-to-face learning and online learning, and their overall journeys with their own reading this year. It is important to note that you will see 68 responses to my survey. I had 140 students this year, but the variables of online learning that made connecting with all students difficult, also presented a barrier to administering an end-of-year survey where all voices were heard. This is feedback in and of itself.

The secret behind our workload is our mindset. While I named my blog and place of reflection “writing mindset,” it really means teacher mindset regarding the job we are doing each day. I just so happen to love teaching reading and writing. The way we think about assessment leads us to take papers home. We believe that we have to take stacks home to provide effective feedback in our English Language Arts classrooms because that has been the tradition. However, a change in mindset can cause us to sway in our thinking; teachers can become flexible in how and why they assess materials in the classroom. Simply, We can minimize the paper load coming home each time we hand out an assignment due to the perceptions we have about the assignment outcome. Bottom line? We control our paper. 

When I first started working on this post, I looked up synonyms for anxiety. Not that I needed a definition, I just was curious what would pop-up on the page. The word that stuck out to me the most was mistrust. As English Teachers and teachers in general, we mistrust ourselves based on our profession workload because it is a.) overwhelming and b.) important work. We come to grasp that we can never achieve perfection, and for many perfectionists, this means in our minds we think we are settling. Teacher anxiety does not apply to just English Teachers alone, but the volume of paper and grading that is specific to the teaching of English creates an interesting dynamic where we often feel behind, tired, and downright depressed. I am not putting on the table that other subjects do not have grading issues, but there is a special place in my soul that dies a little when I take 76 MLA research paper rough drafts home to grade.