For students and schools to continually improve, educators need to gather, analyse, and action student feedback – a process that can take hours each week. So how do some teachers do it, on top of their already very pressing workloads – how do they find the balance?
In Australia, this challenge of workload versus student feedback integration has never been more prominent. Teachers are working an average of 55 hours per week – significantly above their contracted hours – with feedback tasks exacerbating their risk of stress and burnout. Yet, on the other hand, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that one in seven Australian students aged 4-17 years experiences a mental health condition, highlighting the importance of responsive educational strategies1.
Schools need to find a way to efficiently harness student feedback for enhanced education, without adding to their teachers’ already heavy workloads.
The first key step is to ensure your students can actually provide detailed feedback on their emotional and social experiences.
Many of today’s school feedback platforms focus primarily on numbers and statistics, overlooking the rich, detailed information that comes from understanding students’ experiences and perspectives firsthand. For busy educators, this means they’re often left with results that are hard to interpret and that don’t capture the full picture of what’s happening in their classrooms. And without this deeper understanding of individual student journeys, it’s challenging to tailor interventions that will introduce real improvement.
Schools must ensure that their students are engaged, and their voices are being heard.
This requires school feedback tools to actually check in with their students, and to use personalised questions for truly useful responses. This, in turn, enhances a school’s ability to customise student learning experiences, and helps to ensure no critical interventions are overlooked.
Such feedback initiatives within some Australian schools have seen up to a 20% rise in student satisfaction and academic performance, showcasing the transformative power of informed educational practices.
“All the research in the field of wellbeing now demonstrates there is a direct correlation between wellbeing and academic performance. When student wellbeing is in a good place, academic performance is as well.”
~ Sean Inman, Head of Wellbeing Programs, St Peters College Adelaide
The second key step is to ensure teachers and educators can clearly understand and interpret the student feedback, at both a cohort and individual level.
When feedback results are presented in a clear and organised format, educators can easily identify the actions and interventions that need to be implemented, to make a real difference to student and school performance. This also then enables teachers to continue monitoring student engagement and wellbeing with minimal time required for this task.
Find the balance with Bloum.
Bloum Engage is designed to meet the specific needs of the educational sector, with detailed, qualitative feedback acquired from engaged students, and therefore subtleties of student experiences and emotions also captured in the results. This provides a richer, more nuanced understanding of student wellbeing, and enables a more holistic approach to student support, so that they, and your school, may thrive.
Much of the process is automated – including the customisable collection and analysis of student feedback, and the clear presentation of results that are tailored to different roles within a school – saving teachers precious time. This exclusive functionality also gives educators a greater understanding of student journeys, so they may help unlock their students’ full potential.
School leaders have access to broader heatmaps indicating overall school performance and areas for improvement. Bloum Engage also helps with identifying trends, and provides predictions on future developments, enabling educators to proactively address issues without the need for time-consuming analysis.
The platform’s seamless integration ensures that student and staff information is always up to date, facilitating a smooth feedback process without additional administrative burden.
“I think Bloum is a terrific platform to support teachers in engaging in important dialogue around their practices as educators, but I also think it’s an important tool for establishing important conversations around collecting data, collating data, and the use of data to support their practice in the classroom. I think that is really powerful and Bloum offers that opportunity as a platform.”
~ Brendan Hallinan, Deputy Principal, Catholic Regional College
The balance teachers achieve with Bloum means time can be spent on lesson planning, student interaction, and personal development, without compromise to student and school growth.
Are you still spending hours each week manually creating, distributing, collecting, and making sense of student feedback forms? Try Bloum and achieve your balance. Book a demo today
1 Australia’s youth: Mental illness – Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (aihw.gov.au)