Over the past three years, more than 6,500 schools have used Panorama for surveys and data analysis. We’ve gathered a number of best practices from our partner districts, networks, and schools about how they are collecting and analyzing feedback data from their stakeholders.
Because every school, network and district is different, we’ve put together a number of different strategies for you to consider:
1. Student Surveys
Feedback for teacher growth
Student surveys represent a powerful source of feedback to inform teacher growth and reflection. Many schools and districts choose to provide teachers with their individual results while only displaying aggregate data at the school-level. This practice highlights the formative role that student surveys can play for teachers without being evaluative.
Social-emotional learning
The Panorama Student Survey has introduced several survey topics that target social-emotional and “non-cognitive” skills. While this field is relatively new and still developing, there is already consensus that focusing on “whole child” skills is highly beneficial for students. Asking students to self-reflect on constructs like grit, growth mindset, and the level of interest a teacher takes in their long-term success helps to engage students in thinking about their classroom experience while also pushing them to consider how they can take more ownership of their personal learning. Similarly, schools can use students' results to set a baseline and monitor ongoing interventions.
School climate, culture, & safety
Students spend hundreds of hours each year learning and playing at school, and so their feedback about school climate, learning culture, classroom environments and school safety is absolutely essential to creating the kind of schools and classrooms that support student growth and development. By asking research-based survey questions, educators and administrators can better track progress across these key topics.
2. Teacher & Staff Surveys
Self-reflection and growth
In addition to their role in empowering and engaging students, teacher surveys can offer another benefit: they facilitate teacher self-reflection on their own professional environment and teaching practice. Teachers also can play a critical role in assessing evaluation systems and family engagement efforts.
Feedback for principal/leadership team
School leaders can model the practices of the culture of feedback that they are trying to create by asking teachers to answer questions about school leadership effectiveness, school climate, and resources. The Panorama Teacher Survey is designed for school administrators looking to collect feedback from teachers. Administering surveys on these topics can help strengthen the rapport between teachers and leadership and build stronger relationships within a school building.
Feedback on workplace/district
Like students, teachers spend hundreds of hours in schools every year. Because teachers engage with schools not only as educators, but also as employees, teachers have critical feedback to offer about job satisfaction, resources, facilities, and opportunities for professional learning at the school.
3. Family & Community Surveys
Proactive engagement tool to build partnerships
According to Dr. Karen Mapp, one of the co-creators of the Family-School Relationships Survey, districts should engage parents by “building their capacity” to serve as meaningful partners. Surveying parents and guardians represents an exciting opportunity to connect families to schools and to facilitate constructive engagement around important school and community issues.
Evaluating communication, safety, resources
By translating your survey into the languages spoken by your school community, you can engage populations that often are overlooked in engagement efforts or who may not feel comfortable responding in English. Many districts work with Panorama to schedule reminder emails and phone calls, while mailing home letters with paper surveys and scheduling, in order to improve response rates. Our school partners are often very targeted in the feedback that they ask for from families, including asking about longer school days and funding for school programs.
4. Professional Learning for Teachers
Use Playbook to personalize professional learning
We developed Playbook with two simple ideas in mind: teachers know what works best in the classroom and teachers learn best from each other. Playbook provides teachers with hundreds of actionable resources from what's working in the classrooms of other successful teachers. Each resource on Playbook aligns with topics on the Panorama Student Survey, which helps teachers answer "What's next?" after receiving feedback from student surveys.
Bring Panorama to Your School
Our partners are located all over the country and increasingly, the world: we know that each district, network and school has individual needs and priorities for the data they collect. We would love to continue discussing how we can best support your goals and strategic plans for the data you’ll be gathering from your different communities of stakeholders.
Contact us: info@panoramaed.com
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