Having this week to develop surveys that implemented the ideas of Appreciative Inquiry really opened my eyes to the importance of proper questioning and how having a goal in mind of what the survey should reflect / solve is the most important step to finding those right words that truly make a survey worthwhile.

This appreciation came after dialogueing with my partner in crime, Hannah, about the survey I concocted and where I went wrong. Specifically, I was too vague in my approach, too loose-goosey, and because of that, the objective of the survey, though pronounced in my introduction, was not clear. After talking to her on the phone and then emailing back and forth, it was clear that I needed to change the wording of a couple of questions in order to make the survey more approachable and to garner the kind of results I desired. One of my big revelations this week, aside from the importance of questions in general, was how important it was not step away and not make the survey about me or about my job as an evalutor (or teacher) but rather about the person taking the survey and their experience during the course of what was being evaluated. Because I am so engrained in this project, it was hard for me to ask questions that didn’t center around my performance as a teacher or as an evaluator. Talking to Hannah and hearing her concerns about certain questions lead me to see that there were some questions that were centered too much around the teaching and not enough about the experience of the student.

For example, one of my “draft” questions was, “Now that you have seen how a wiki can be used in the classroom, what three wishes do you have to use a wiki in school?” That is such a “teacher-centered” question that a student taking the survey would not feel compelled or interested to answer. Instead, I changed the question to reflect the learner, the student, and how wiki’s were used in their classroom and what positive experiences came with it. In this came, the result will be more focused on what students are enjoying in regards to wiki-use, and solving this problem helped me not only articulate the focus of said particular question but also of the survey as a whole.