Academic Council: Survey Results

Introduction: We sent out a survey earlier in the year to be completed by 500 students. Our sample included an equal number of girls and boys from all 5 year levels. We are here today to present the results of the survey. We are not here to tell you how to do your job but to show you the opinions of your students and how they feel about teaching and learning at MAGS.

We asked: “What do your teachers do to keep you interested?” From these results we understand that students will be more interested and engaged when the teacher is able to incorporate a bit of laughter into the lesson. Also they are understandably kept interested by movies and power points, but then again they may not exactly have their educations at heart in this instance. Use of games and competitions will definitely keep students’ attention, especially if there are prizes up for grabs. Lastly they think that’s its pretty hard to have interest in a lesson if the teacher doesn’t make an effort to interact with students.

We asked: “What qualities are most important in a good teacher?” An encouraging personality is seen as a very important quality in a teacher by the students of MAGS. A student that is afraid of their teacher won’t ask questions and won’t learn. Knowledge of subject matter is obviously a pretty vital quality in a teacher and good classroom management is also important in that students need to stay on task in order to learn. Having teachers that are passionate for their subjects is also considered important amongst your students whereas surprisingly effective discipline skills and high expectations were not so popular options.

We asked: “How do you learn best?” Your students learn best by doing, whether it be through practicals or practice essays. As they say, practice makes perfect. They also find listening to you and absorbing the information that way effective. The third most popular choice was writing down the information. This means that they will have notes in their books from which they can revise closer to exam time and some students find subject matter easier to remember by writing it down themselves.

Conclusion: These were the results that were most relevant to you as teachers and hopefully we told you something you didn’t know before. If not then hopefully you are already keeping your students interested, already displaying the qualities of a good teacher and already supporting the various learning styles of your students.