Top teacher survey questions you need to ask

School administrators support the teachers who work for them. They can remove barriers to resources and mediate problems that arise throughout the year.

Clear communication is essential for administrators to have strong relationships with their staff. If administration teams don’t know what teachers need or what challenges keep them up at night, they can’t provide solutions to improve the educational experience.

One way to better connect with your teachers is through surveys. Read on to learn more about the benefits of surveying teachers and some top teacher survey questions to include in your questionnaires.

The importance of teacher surveys

Surveys are a key part of collecting feedback from your staff, and that feedback is necessary if you want to know what you need to act on. You can use surveys to create benchmarks for your school’s performance and then resend them at a later date to check your progress on school improvements.

“The first way to get feedback right is to look at it as a process and not a one-and-done event to tick off a box,” says Peter DeWitt, a former principal turned author and leadership coach. “When we look at feedback as something to get done, we miss a great learning opportunity.”

Surveys can help you learn how your teachers are feeling and what challenges they’re facing. But it’s not enough to use their feedback to identify problems. Instead, you need to identify the issue, take steps to solve it, and then check with teachers to see if the new solution is working as it should.

Surveys, and specifically online surveys, are also useful because you can send them out quickly and get responses within a few hours. Administrators can regularly send short surveys with a just few questions to quickly gauge interest or teacher opinions on issues.

“Stakeholder surveys can ask about any topic related to their experience with your school or district,” writes the team at Education Elements. “The best surveys, however, include questions that are mostly related to one similar concept.”

For example, you might create a survey specific to the number of hours your teachers work and their perceived work-life balance. This can give you more concrete answers than a generic survey about workplace happiness.

Remember, the survey data won’t always deliver the results you want. If you want your teachers to be honest, be prepared to get some surprising answers.

“As difficult as it can be to receive less-than-positive feedback, it is so beneficial to how I make decisions,” writes Mike Woodlock, a high school principal and author of UDL Playbook for School and District Administrators. “If we are not aware of the concerns of staff, we cannot address them.”

Top benefits of surveying teachers

There are several reasons to use teacher surveys to collect feedback. Conducting online surveys is one of the most efficient ways to understand what staff members are thinking. Online teacher surveys are beneficial in a number of ways:

1. Speed: You can collect feedback from teachers within a few hours.
2. Anonymity: Anonymous surveys allow teachers to feel safe providing negative feedback.
3. Frequency: You can send out surveys frequently to collect timely feedback.
4. Sample size: You can get accurate data with larger sample sizes, ensuring your feedback has value.
5. Time: Surveys can help you save time because you receive data from your entire staff at once without having to hold individual interviews.

As an administrator, you can send out an online survey in the morning and have dozens of responses by the afternoon. From there, you can sort through the information and pull relevant trends from the feedback you receive.

10 teacher survey questions to start with

The surveys you send to your teachers can cover almost any topic. You can ask about parent-teacher relationships or cover basic questions related to employment and school policies. Here are a few teacher survey questions to get your creative juices flowing, along with why it’s beneficial to ask them.

1. How many hours do you work each week? This can help you understand the burnout potential for teachers who regularly work late.
2. Which method of communication do parents use the most? This can help admins learn whether parents prefer emails, texts, phone calls, or even social media for updates.
3. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? “I have enough time to help each student throughout the day.” Use questions like this to see if teachers are overwhelmed with large class sizes.
4. Is this statement true or false for you? “I use my personal money to buy school supplies.” Similarly, this can highlight budgeting challenges in your school.
5. What process within the school do you think could use some improvement? Why does it need improvement, and what adjustments would you make? Let your teachers tell you what improvements they need you to make.
6. How many lesson plans do you reuse year after year? This can help admins learn how much planning time returning teachers need to allocate.
7. Which tech tools are essential for your classroom? Determine where to allocate your tech budget based on teacher needs.

8. Where do you turn for help when facing a problem? This can help you see how much support your teachers feel they have.
9. How prepared do you feel students were when they entered your classroom? You can use a question like this to learn about the effects of distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic or general student preparedness.
10. On a scale of 1–10, how happy are you teaching at this school? This can help you understand burnout levels or potential turnover rates.

Remember, you may see better results if you focus on one topic at a time. Choose one of these teacher survey questions and build a miniature survey with follow-up queries to give you more information.

Jotform: The effective way to launch your teacher surveys

Once you’re ready to start surveying your teachers, make sure you have the right tools for the job.

Jotform has a free online survey maker tool that comes with tutorials, design options, and existing templates that you can build off of. You can start with a satisfaction survey if you want to understand how your teachers are feeling or launch another type of school survey designed for your teachers.

Get to know everything Jotform offers, including our education form templates, and learn how our tools can help you run your school using data-driven insights.

Photo by Eliabe Costa on Unsplash