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Lots of teachers give their students some kind of questionnaire at the beginning of a school year or semester — a form where they can tell you about their interests, preferences, things you should know about them as a student, favorite movies, books, tv shows, all kinds of things. I gave one of these to every student in every class, every year. And I loved reading them and learning more about the people I would spend the next school year with. 

But I made one mistake with those surveys that took me years to correct: I would read them only once, put them in a file, and if I ever looked at them again, it wasn’t until much later in the school year, often because I happened to stumble on the folder and go, Oh yeah, these things, and sometimes I’d flip through them, usually finding a few surprises on them. By that point in the year, I had gotten to know my students a lot better, or so I thought, and while lots of things were right in line with what I knew about most kids, there were always certain details they’d shared on that first day that never came up again. I always felt like I didn’t really make the most of the information I got on those forms.

Finally one year I got smarter: I created a spreadsheet with every student’s name along the left and all the questions in columns across the top. I manually entered their responses from the questionnaires into the spreadsheet, so I had it all in one place. (Yes, with over 120 students, that took a LOT of time, and now there’s technology that would speed that way up … more on that later.) For the rest of the year, anytime I wanted to remember what a student’s favorite candy was, or what sports they played, or what their favorite tv show was, all I had to do was check the spreadsheet.

Image Source: Hacking Education, ©2015 Times 10 Publications

Apart from being a central place to find information from that initial survey, the spreadsheet also ended up having other benefits. For one, I could keep adding to it as the year went on. So if a student came into class one day and mentioned having a new puppy at home or a relative that had been diagnosed with a serious illness, I could add these to the spreadsheet, then check on them in a few weeks to see how things were going. I could also create whole new columns for questions I didn’t think to ask at the beginning of the year, gather that information, and add it.

Another benefit was that a quick glance at the spreadsheet would tell me which students I needed to get to know better: Lots of blank spaces in their row would indicate that there was a lot I didn’t know about them, and that would prompt me to take action to fill more of them up. Before I used a spreadsheet, these students would have been more likely to get a lot less of my attention; it would have been gobbled up by my more extroverted students without me even realizing it. 

And now the spreadsheet wouldn’t even need to be filled manually: By using a Google Form to do the questionnaire, I could have student responses automatically poured into a spreadsheet, and from there I could add to it as the year progressed. 

So if you’re already making an effort to get to know your students with some kind of survey or questionnaire, make the most of it by putting those responses into a spreadsheet you can refer to and build on for the rest of the year.

I shared this idea, which we called the 360 Spreadsheet, in the 2015 book I co-wrote with Mark Barnes, Hacking Education: 10 Quick Fixes for Every School.

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