So yesterday, I received an email asking me for the following:
I am needing some assistance with a parent survey. We are in our first year of our 1:1 Learning Adventure here at BBE. I would like to survey the parents of our district to get some feedback of how they feel things are going with the 1:1 Initiative. Would you be willing to share some questions that you think would be good to put on my Google Form for the parents to complete? I am also needing to bring this data to my school board at the end of the month. Any help/ guidance would be greatly appreciated!
When I first received this, my brain was stuck and honestly, I was tired. I had nothing. So then I send out a proverbial “educational bat signal” on Twitter and ask for help!
If you had a 1:1 initiative in your school district, and you wanted feedback from parents on it, what would you ask them?
— George Couros (@gcouros) January 6, 2016
If you look at the tweet, you will see tons of great questions and responses from educators all over the place, helping someone else out.
Here are a few things I am reminded of in this process.
- Asking for help is often a sign of strength not weakness.
- Sometimes laziness can lead to innovation 🙂 I really felt I was running on empty when I got this response.
- Truly we are better together. I would have not been able to come up with the quantity or quality of questions that I received if I did this on my own.
- People that might be going through the process benefit from someone asking in their network.
- People that had no thought of doing this, now might because they thought, “that’s a great idea to ask parents for feedback on this initiative. I am totally stealing some of those questions.”
Building a network takes time, but if you are willing to invest in it, what you get out of it can be so powerful.
