I Wish My Teacher Knew

A Practical Guide to Using I Wish My Teacher Knew in the Classroom

The "I Wish My Teacher Knew" exercise is a deceptively simple formative assessment tool. It involves asking students to anonymously complete the sentence stem "I wish my teacher knew..." and then reading those responses to adjust your instruction. That's the basic version. The actual execution matters more than the concept. The original framework comes from a poem by Forrest Church published in 1998, and it was later adapted by education researchers like Linda Lander for classroom use. Students write their responses on paper, slips, or digital forms. You collect them without reading names. You read through them in bulk. Then you do something with what you find. Most people stop there. They collect the responses, read them, and feel vaguely enlightened. That's not using the tool. That's just participating in a feel-good activity. The actual work happens after you've read everything and recognized the patterns.

I set up a variation of this exercise once in a high school chemistry class. The anonymous responses revealed that three students were using outdated textbooks at home because their families couldn't afford replacements, and they were falling behind on homework that assumed access to the current edition's online components. The fix wasn't inspiring. I spent my own money buying three used copies and found two spare login codes from a retired course shell. It cost me about eighty dollars and took an afternoon to sort out. But I saw those three students catching up over the next month. The exercise had surfaced a problem I would have missed entirely.

Setting It Up Without Wasting Time

The most common failure point is logistics. If you make this take more than ten minutes of class time, students will treat it like busywork and give shallow answers. Keep it tight. Here's what I've found works. Give students five minutes. Hand out index cards or use a Google Form if you're comfortable with that. State clearly that this is anonymous and that you won't be grading or punishing anyone for honesty. Tell them the prompt is "I wish my teacher knew..." and let them finish the sentence however they want. That's it. No additional instructions. No "be creative." No "make it funny." Just the stem and the time limit. Collect the cards immediately. Don't let them linger on desks. Read through them the same day while they're fresh. If you wait until next week, you'll forget which comments triggered what adjustments, and the whole exercise loses its value.

What to Look For

When you're reading through responses, look for patterns rather than individual complaints. One student writing "I wish you knew I don't have internet at home" is a data point. Five students writing variations of that is a pattern. Three students asking for more examples before quizzes is a pattern. Ten students saying the pacing is too fast is a signal worth acting on immediately. The useful categories tend to fall into a few buckets. Academic needs: students who are lost, students who are bored, students who need different explanations. Logistical issues: unclear instructions, confusing assignments, technology problems. Emotional or social concerns: anxiety about grades, conflicts with classmates, stress from outside their school life. Personal circumstances: family issues, health problems, work obligations that eat into study time. The last category is the hardest to handle. You can't fix a student's home situation. But knowing it exists changes how you respond to missed assignments and late work. I've learned to separate "can I solve this" from "can I accommodate this." Some problems need a referral to counseling or administration. Others just need a deadline extension and a brief check-in.

Acting on What You Find

Here's where most teachers derail themselves. They collect the responses, read them, and then do nothing because acting feels risky or awkward. Don't do that. Even small adjustments signal to students that you actually read and cared about what they wrote. If multiple students are confused about an assignment, rewrite the instructions and distribute them again. If students say you talk too fast, slow down and pause more frequently. If several students mention hunger or fatigue, stop making a big deal about missing breakfast and just be aware. If students are stressed about a test, offer a review session or release a study guide early. These are modest changes. None of them require a paradigm shift. The one thing I always do differently after this exercise is adjust my assumption baseline. Before seeing the responses, I assume most students are keeping up and just need the occasional nudge. After reading them, I realize that assumption is usually wrong. A significant portion of any class is quietly struggling with something I have no visibility into. The exercise doesn't tell me everything, but it fills in the gaps I can't see.

Pitfalls and Where This Method Breaks Down

This approach has real limitations. First, it depends on student willingness to be honest. In schools with punitive cultures around participation or attendance, students will write safe, vague responses. "I wish you knew I try hard" is the most common filler answer. It tells you nothing and gives you nothing to work with. You can mitigate this by guaranteeing anonymity and making it clear that there are no wrong answers, but you can't eliminate the problem entirely if your school environment doesn't support it. Second, the exercise surfaces problems but doesn't solve them. You might learn that half your class is working jobs after school and can't complete evening assignments. Knowing that doesn't change the fact that they still need to learn the material. You'll need to adapt your assignments or your grading policies regardless, and that's harder than it sounds when you're working within district requirements and standardized testing timelines. Third, frequency matters. Doing this once a year gives you a snapshot. Doing it every six weeks gives you a trend. I've found quarterly is about right for most classrooms. More often and students start gaming it. Less often and you miss shifts in how they're adjusting to your teaching style.

Finally, there's a trap I fell into early. I started sharing some of the anonymous feedback with the class as a whole. That backfired. Students who had written vulnerable things felt exposed even though I'd removed identifying details. Some became quieter afterward. I stopped doing that and now keep the responses private unless a theme is broadly relevant and I can address it without any identifiable trace.

A Word About Digital Versions

Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, and similar tools work fine for this. They save you the physical collection step and make pattern recognition easier since you can sort and filter responses. The tradeoff is that not all students have equal access to devices outside school hours, and asking them to complete this on a screen can feel less personal than handwriting on paper. I use paper for the actual responses and then type them into a document for organization. It adds fifteen minutes to the process but makes the sorting step significantly faster.

Bottom Line

The I Wish My Teacher Knew exercise isn't revolutionary. It won't transform your teaching overnight. But it gives you information you won't get any other way, and that information is usually the difference between guessing what your students need and actually knowing. The version I use lives at the official site associated with the original poem and the educational resources built around it. It's free to download and print. Most schools have already adopted it informally without looking for a formal source.