Using Survey Builder to engage and listen to students

Background

Toksook Bay School, Alaska is part of the Lower Kuskokwim School District, and has over 186 pupils and 41 staff. The school has been using Pulse for a year and have found the Survey Builder feature beneficial for the school. We spoke with Principal, Michael Robbins from Toksook Bay in the Lower Kuskokwim School District.

How has Survey Builder helped your school?

We love the immediate feedback on school climate, we are creating a student-centeredlearning environment so the number one voice that we have is the student. This powerful survey builder tool directly impacts what we do.

We are transparent with the data, so the students understand where they are at with the school. Students have taken more ownership of the school after they see the results of the survey, they own a piece of this and feel they are making a real impact. Survey Builder shows us what the school staff are thinking, the staff have a perception of what's going on in the school which could be completely different to the student’s perception so to make those two perceptions connect builds for better relationships. The whole structure in our school is based on relationships between staff and students, Pulse helps to connect both these groups together.

Pulse is the voice for the students, it is an important lens for us to use

Survey Builder provides the school community with a fuller picture of where our students are at and this is incredibly importantfor us and their parents. We need to know what our students are thinking about at school, do they like it? Are they being bullied? Also what is the social media impact on our school? We asked all those questions to our students and then created a policy around the answers to those questions. Around 90% of our students take these surveys and respond back, as a result we have a very good sense of where our students are at on a weekly basis. Students are now wanting to ask certain questions on the surveys, even our school board are asking us to ask questions on thesurveys to get a good sense of where the students are at and now the community is interested in the feedback and outcomes. Survey Builder makes a huge impact on what we do as a school, we now have one lens to look through.

Is Survey Builder easy to use?

Survey builder is incredibly easy to use and flexible. It provides a variety of different interfaces dependant on the different audiences that you have. We like that the students can use the survey slider with the expression icons on because in our school we have 7th graders up to 12th graders in a bilingual school. They may not know what strongly agree and strongly disagree means but they certainly know what the icons mean. The nimbleness and ease of access for students gives an accurate description of their feelings and thoughts.

Survey Builder is easy to send because we have a link we can distribute through email. There are very few barriers to getting into the survey, with some surveys you have to spend time answering questions about your name/age/email, it's so much easier to have a link. We love that we can custom build the survey with our logo, our students know that we take their responses seriously and we like that they can add comments to it.

Survey Builder makes a huge impact on what we do as a school, we now have one lens to look through.

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