Creative Confessionals: Getting to Know What Your Students Need

I try so hard to eliminate the damaging power structures in place between teachers and students and part of that requires the students to engage in some risk-taking. Many times, though, students feel compelled to tell me what they think I want to hear about their learning progress and process. So I worked to create a way to cut out the nonsense and give students a creative and clear way to communicate their real feelings, needs, successes, and failures to me in a low-stakes way.

The Creative Confessional idea come out of the 2018 ADE Institute in Austin and has become an ongoing, semester-long assignment in all my classes. This direct way of communicating with my students has become even more vital now that I am teaching in a variety of modalities (face to face, remote, asynchronous). I've compiled some great examples of submissions here. Feel free to use and share!