This article will guide you on how to create a teacher survey about professional development. With Specific, you can generate surveys like this in seconds—just build your own survey with a single prompt and start collecting actionable feedback instantly.
Steps to create a survey for teachers about professional development
If you want to save time, just generate a survey with Specific. Here’s how simple it is:
Tell what survey you want.
Done.
Honestly, you don’t even need to read further—AI handles everything, creating expert, relevant questions based on your needs. It even follows up with respondents to go deeper, so you get insights that truly matter. If you’re interested in manual details, read on. But if you value your time, try AI-powered surveys now.
Why running professional development surveys for teachers is essential
Professional development surveys aren’t just about compliance or checking a box—they’re a real driver of improvement and engagement. When we listen to teachers about their professional development needs, we gain direction for future programs and spot issues before they become big problems.
If you don’t gather feedback, you risk making expensive investments in workshops that go unused or irrelevant.
Without teacher input, you can’t measure the impact of your efforts or discover emerging needs.
One powerful insight: Teachers who participate in meaningful professional development—49 hours over 6 to 12 months—can boost student achievement by as much as 21 percentile points. [1] This isn’t minor; it changes classrooms and lives. Another compelling data point: 87% of teachers felt more engaged and motivated after participating in targeted professional development. [2] If you’re not running these surveys, you’re missing the best opportunities to truly empower your teaching staff and improve student learning. The importance of a teacher recognition survey, or a teacher feedback initiative, can’t be overstated when the results affect everyone’s success.
What makes a good survey on professional development for teachers
A quality professional development survey goes beyond generic forms. You need clear, unbiased questions that lead respondents to honest, useful feedback. The tone should be conversational rather than formal to put teachers at ease and encourage authenticity—this automatically improves both response rate and quality.
Here’s what distinguishes a great teacher feedback survey from a forgettable one:
Bad Practices | Good Practices |
|---|---|
Leading questions (“Don’t you agree this training was useful?”) | Neutral phrasing (“How useful was this training session for your teaching?”) |
Boring tone (“Please rate the following.”) | Conversational tone (“How did you feel about last month’s workshop?”) |
No follow-ups on vague answers | Explores “why” through smart follow-up questions |
You’ll know your survey is working if you see both high response quantity and rich, detailed responses. Aim for both—you’ll only get meaningful insights when teachers participate fully and share their genuine thoughts.
Types of questions to use in a teacher survey about professional development
For professional development, you want a mix of question types to uncover practical needs and personal experiences, not just statistics. Here’s what to include for the best survey composition:
Open-ended questions let you discover deeper insights and get honest, unfiltered opinions. Use them when you want to understand “why” teachers feel a certain way or to capture stories you’d never think to ask about directly. Examples:
What was the most valuable part of your last professional development session?
What topics or skills would you like to explore in future workshops?
Single-select multiple-choice questions are perfect for quick analysis and when you want to spot clear trends. Use them to measure satisfaction, identify priorities, or segment teachers. Example:
How satisfied are you with the range of professional development opportunities offered this year?
Very satisfied
Somewhat satisfied
Neutral
Somewhat dissatisfied
Very dissatisfied
NPS (Net Promoter Score) question helps you benchmark overall satisfaction and lets you track improvement over time. Use it when you want one strong north star metric. You can generate a teacher NPS survey instantly. Example:
On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our professional development program to a colleague?
Followup questions to uncover "the why" are essential when you want context: If someone gives a low satisfaction rating, you need to know why to fix it. For example:
Can you share what would make the sessions more valuable for you?
If you want more inspiration, explore the library of best questions for teacher surveys about professional development—there you’ll find creative, effective examples and tips for crafting them.
What is a conversational survey?
Conversational surveys, especially those built with AI, feel much more like a real back-and-forth chat. Rather than static forms or robotic questions, a conversational survey adapts based on each teacher’s answers—you get detail and nuance, while your colleagues feel more comfortable and heard. These are not just surveys; they’re interviews conducted at scale.
Traditional/manual survey creation can be a slog—lots of clicking, endless formatting, and no guarantee you’re covering what matters. With AI-driven survey generation, you cut hours of work down to seconds, and let expert knowledge drive the process. Here’s a quick comparison:
Manual Surveys | AI-generated Surveys |
|---|---|
Time-consuming setup | Instant creation with natural language prompts |
Rigid, one-size-fits-all questions | Dynamic, respondent-specific followups |
No built-in analysis | AI-powered summaries and response analysis |
Why use AI for teacher surveys? It’s simple: you get a smarter, faster process—plus higher quality insights. If you’re looking for more guidance, check out our step-by-step guide on how to create and analyze survey responses with AI. Every step of the way, Specific delivers a best-in-class conversational survey experience, making the feedback process enjoyable for everyone involved. Semantic SEO example: If you want an AI survey example, or see a conversational AI survey variant, Specific is your best option.
The power of follow-up questions
Follow-up questions matter. Too often, traditional teacher surveys leave us with incomplete answers and more confusion. Specific’s automatic AI follow-up questions feature changes the game: AI asks smart, context-based followups in real time, like an expert interviewer digging deeper for clarity and actionable insight.
Teacher: The training topics weren’t relevant.
AI follow-up: Can you tell us which topics would have been most useful to you?
Without that follow-up, you’d only know there was a problem, not how to solve it—missing real improvement opportunities.
How many followups to ask? For most teacher surveys, 2–3 targeted follow-up questions are perfect. Go deep enough to capture context, but allow teachers to skip forward once you have the information you need. Specific lets you tweak this setting for each survey, so you get rich detail without survey fatigue.
This makes it a conversational survey—each response becomes a dialogue, which builds trust and yields higher quality data.
AI response analysis, interactive survey insights: Even with pages of open-ended responses and followups, AI makes it easy to understand all the results. To see exactly how it works, read about AI-powered analysis of teacher survey responses.
These automated followups are a completely new concept in teacher feedback. Try creating a survey to experience how much more you can learn.
See this professional development survey example now
Create your own survey in seconds—the fastest, most engaging way to understand what teachers really need. With real-time followups and instant AI-powered analysis, you’ll capture insights that traditional survey tools simply miss. Experience the difference now.