Using YouthTruth’s surveys to gather data about your student, family, and staff experiences in school is just the start of creating a culture of feedback. The next important step is to let them know that their feedback is important to you.
Unfortunately, we frequently read in open-ended responses comments from students like, “Nobody is going to read this anyway” and “Nothing changes. We never hear back about our comments.”
Here is a suggestion for closing the feedback loop that you can do soon after receiving your YouthTruth reports. This simple act of reflecting what you heard back to your students, families, and staff makes feedback in your community a two-way conversation and ignites a feedback loop with the power to fuel your improvement processes.
Compose a simple message of “Thank you. I heard you.” This might take the form of a short presentation at assembly, a newsletter, or a written note of appreciation. You might want to focus on just open-ended comments, or you might want to include reflections on your quantitative and qualitative data. Here are some sentence prompts to help you get started.
