Best questions for teacher survey about remote teaching

Here are some of the best questions for a teacher survey about remote teaching, plus tips on building questions that spark great feedback. If you want, you can instantly generate your own teacher survey for remote teaching using Specific—it's fast and easy.

Best open-ended questions for teacher survey about remote teaching

Open-ended questions invite teachers to share their stories, insights, and pain points in their own words. This can illuminate nuanced challenges or uncover unexpected themes. While open questions can have slightly higher nonresponse rates—on average 18%, according to Pew Research Center—their qualitative depth is tough to beat for understanding the reality of remote teaching. [1] Use them at the start to welcome richer responses, or as follow-ups to clarify specific issues uncovered by multiple-choice questions. Here are our picks for the top 10 open-ended questions to ask:

1. What has been your biggest challenge teaching remotely?

2. How has remote teaching changed the way you interact with your students?

3. Can you describe a recent success you had in your remote classroom?

4. What tools or technologies have been most helpful for your remote instruction, and why?

5. If you could change one thing about your remote teaching experience, what would it be?

6. How do you maintain student engagement during online classes?

7. What support do you wish you had received as a remote teacher?

8. How do you assess student progress remotely?

9. Are there professional development topics you’d like more training on for remote teaching?

10. How has remote teaching impacted your work-life balance?

Open questions are especially valuable when you want to collect unstructured ideas, surface pain points, or explore topics you might not have considered. Just remember to keep them concise and focused, and be deliberate about when to use them—sometimes, a couple of well-chosen open questions go further than filling a survey with dozens.

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for teacher survey about remote teaching

Single-select multiple-choice questions are best when you want to measure trends, compare results over time, or lower cognitive effort for busy teachers. They’re effective to quickly gauge consensus, quantify experience, or provide an easy entry point to the conversation. Respondents often prefer picking from a few options over typing longer responses, which helps with response rates and question clarity.

Here are three example questions, each with clear options:

Question: Which digital platform do you use most frequently for remote teaching?

• Google Classroom

• Zoom

• Microsoft Teams

• Other

Question: How confident do you feel using new technology in your online classroom?

• Very confident

• Somewhat confident

• Not confident

Question: How often do you receive technical support when you need it?

• Always

• Sometimes

• Rarely

• Never

When to follow up with "why?" Once a teacher selects an answer (for example, "Not confident" about new technology), a simple follow-up—such as "Can you share why you feel not confident using new technology?"—can reveal root causes and provide actionable detail. This probing is key to getting from surface-level feedback to real insights about remote teaching experiences.

When and why to add the "Other" choice? Including an "Other" option and allowing teachers to explain their answer via a follow-up can lead to surprising discoveries—maybe a niche tool is gaining traction, or a support channel nobody else mentioned is proving helpful. These write-in responses often capture outliers you wouldn’t have thought to ask about, and they’re easy to analyze with the help of AI survey tools.

Net promoter score: does it make sense for teacher survey about remote teaching?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a powerful, easy-to-understand way to measure overall teacher satisfaction with remote teaching tools or practices. You simply ask: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend remote teaching at our school to a colleague?” This gives you a clear metric that tracks loyalty—and, with effective follow-ups, reveals why teachers are promoters, passives, or detractors. Specific can automatically generate an NPS survey for your remote teaching context, letting you instantly benchmark satisfaction and identify opportunities for improvement.

The power of follow-up questions

Anyone who’s run a survey knows the struggle: someone leaves an answer that feels... incomplete. That’s where the magic of follow-up questions comes in. Automated AI-driven follow-ups, just like the ones Specific uses, take your survey from static forms to real conversations—giving teachers the chance to clarify and expand on their experiences.

Studies confirm the benefit—short, timely follow-ups boost response quality and completion rates, especially if you reach out soon after the initial response. [2] Plus, AI-powered conversational surveys have been shown to elicit richer, more detailed responses in education settings, yielding more actionable insights for decision makers. [3]

• Teacher: Sometimes students don't engage during video calls.

• AI follow-up: What strategies have you tried to improve student engagement during video calls?

How many follow-ups to ask? In practice, two or three targeted follow-up questions usually bring out the detail you need, especially when respondents can skip if they feel they've said enough. Specific lets you fine-tune this, so you never overwhelm or lose your audience mid-survey.

This makes it a conversational survey—the flow feels natural, not like ticking boxes, so teachers are more likely to open up. That's the heart of what we call conversational surveys: it’s not just Q&A, it’s a dynamic exchange.

Easy analysis, even with lots of text responses: Today, analyzing open-ended survey data is effortless. AI survey response analysis features let you chat with your data, summarizing responses and surfacing themes as if you had a research analyst on call. Even with rich, unstructured text, making sense of survey results takes minutes, not days.

Automated follow-ups are a new paradigm—if you haven't tried it yet, spin up a conversational survey with AI-generated follow-up logic and see just how different it feels.

How to write a ChatGPT prompt for creating teacher survey about remote teaching

Want to write powerful questions using AI? Here's how to prompt ChatGPT (or any GPT model) to generate great teacher survey items. Start simple, then add context for better results.

First, start with a basic prompt:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for teacher survey about remote teaching.

But you'll get higher quality, more useful questions if you add details—like who you are, your teaching context, or specific outcomes you're after. For example:

I'm designing a feedback survey for K-12 teachers at a public school, focusing on challenges and wins in remote teaching over the past year. Our goal is to improve both tech support and professional development. Please suggest 10 open-ended questions that would reveal concrete experiences and actionable needs.

Next, organize your survey by topic. Ask:

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.

Once you know the categories you care about most (e.g., technology, student engagement, assessment), you can tell the AI to hone in on specifics:

Generate 10 questions for categories Technology Support, Assessment, and Student Engagement (as identified above).

What makes a survey conversational?

A conversational survey is more than just a list of questions—it’s an adaptive, interactive exchange, powered by AI that responds to teachers’ answers with relevant follow-ups, just as a thoughtful human would. This dynamic approach lets you capture richer, more contextual insights, cut through ambiguity, and keep respondents engaged longer.

Here’s a quick comparison:

Why use AI for teacher surveys? The biggest win is in both speed and quality: you get more context-rich, nuanced feedback from teachers fast. An AI survey example, created with the conversational survey builder, can feel more like a dialogue than a test. This helps teachers feel heard, not interrogated, and makes your data easier to act on.

For educators, this means surveys don’t feel cold or tedious—and for you, it means higher completion rates, deeper understanding, and much less time spent building, launching, and analyzing. Learn how to create a teacher survey about remote teaching, or see examples with in-depth feedback collection and analysis at Specific, the authority in conversational surveys.

Specific brings best-in-class user experience for both survey creators and respondents, making feedback collection smooth, intuitive, and genuinely engaging.

See this remote teaching survey example now

Ready to get deeper insights from teachers about remote teaching? Leverage the best question formats, smart follow-ups, and conversational survey flow—build your survey and experience advanced AI-powered analysis right away. See how a conversational approach transforms your feedback process.