Net Promoter Score for Teachers

Summary: You can use Net Promoter Score to measure your students’ experience with you and quantify how well-liked you are by your students.

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I always knew that I was well-liked by my students. I could tell by my interactions and conversations with them and what other teachers or parents told me. I could tell other people, like you reading this post right now, my friends, and even job interviewers that I was well-liked by my students. But how would they know?

I had plenty of stories to share, handwritten notes, emails, pictures, and small gifts to display. Still, I felt something was still missing– numerical evidence. As a math teacher, I wanted to back this up with numbers. I just didn’t know how.

In this post, I’ll explain the concept of Net Promoter Score (NPS), make a case for why you should use it as a teacher transitioning to a business career, and give an example to show how you can practically measure NPS in your classroom.

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What Is Net Promoter Score?

According to netpromoter.com, Net Promoter Score “measures customer experience and predicts business growth.” It also “provides the core measurement for customer experience management programs.” Here’s a short YouTube video from TemkinGroup to help you understand What Is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

I learned about NPS at my current company. We use NPS for everything. I mean everything. I’m fascinated by NPS because of its simplicity. The first question “How likely are you to recommend X to a friend, family member, or colleague?” defines close-ended numerical responses while the second question “Why?” allows for open-ended responses.

As a teacher, I could’ve asked my students “How likely are you to recommend Mr. Banh to a friend, peer, or another student at this school?” and “Why?” I’d have a number for my NPS and a list of positive, neutral, and negative feedback to act on. NPS is one way that I could’ve solved the problem I described earlier: I didn’t know how to quantify how well-liked I was by my students.

Okay. Let me pause here. I feel like I HAVE to address this because I’m trying to balance being precise with my words and, at the same time, keeping the concept simple… I’m equating an NPS to how well-liked I was by my students but the actual measurement is how likely my students were to recommend me. They’re NOT exactly the same thing. I just want to put it in human terms for you. And now I’ve unnecessarily extended the length of this post I’m sorry I care this much!!!!

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3 Reasons Why You Should Use NPS

Let me give you three reasons why you should use NPS as a teacher. Maybe I can convince you.

1. You can quantify how well-liked you are by your students (their “customer” experience) and get their feedback in a simple way. Oh, how the tables have turned! Now you’re the one who doesn’t want to open the report card and see what you got. You’ll hear this a lot from proponents of NPS: It’s not so much about the number– it’s what you do with it.
2. You already survey your students anyways. It’s not extra work. Every mid-quarter I’d set aside five minutes at the beginning of class to give my students time to answer a short two-question Google Forms survey: “What is one thing Mr. Banh does that helps you learn?” and “What is one thing Mr. Banh could do to help you learn better?” It would’ve been easy to just add the two NPS questions after them. (I don’t think I would’ve replaced my two original questions entirely because, to me, they were the right questions to ask.)
3. You get practice translating your teaching experience to a business context. I know you’ve felt stressed thinking about how you can advocate the value you bring as a teacher to interviewers who might not fully appreciate the value of teachers. I bet it’d be impressive for a teacher to walk into an interview room and casually talk about NPS.

If you’ve read these three reasons and you still don’t want to do it, then that’s okay. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and nothing lost.

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A Teacher Example

Suppose I could go back in time to add the two NPS questions to my mid-quarter survey. I send my survey to 120 students and get the responses below:

So what does that mean? Well, mathematically speaking, there’s a difference of positive 51 points between the percentage of students who are my Promoters versus the percentage of students who are my Detractors. Okay…

In reality, it wouldn’t mean too much right now. It’s just a number. Considering an NPS can range from -100 to 100, I’d generally be happy to see a positive score and know that I have more Promoters than Detractors. That is, there are more students who are extremely likely to recommend me (9-10s) than there are students who either are neutral or not at all likely recommend me (0-6s).

Like I said earlier, it’s not so much about the number– it’s what you do with it. I’d look at my NPS and read my students’ survey responses. Whatever my Promoters said they liked about me, I’d try to keep doing. Whatever my Passives or Detractors said, I’d try to improve their experience with me.

Maybe at the next mid-quarter I send the same survey to my students again. This time I get an NPS of 63. Then I could say something like “I increased my NPS with students by 12 points quarter over quarter.” Sounds good, right? I just quantified an improvement on how much my students like me– more specifically, their “customer” experience with me.

Maybe I’ve given the same survey for the past four mid-quarters and received an NPS of 51, 63, 57, and 58, respectively. Then I could say something like “I maintained my NPS with students at 51 or higher for the past four quarters.” How about that? I just quantified my ability to get students to like me and keep them liking me.

I’m fascinated with how I could’ve used NPS to measure how well-liked I was by my students beyond my stories, handwritten notes, emails, pictures, and small gifts. For you reading this post now, are you at least a little interested?

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Limitations of NPS

Let me get off the podium now. I’m not going to argue that NPS is a critical measure of your success as a teacher. You’ve succeeded without NPS until now; I’m sure you could continue the rest of your teaching career without thinking about it ever again. As much as I’m personally fascinated by NPS, I also recognize its limitations.

1. NPS is often used to benchmark against industry competitors. A company might say “You should buy our product because we have a customer NPS of 15 and our two primary competitors have an NPS of -21 and -5, respectively.” As a teacher, you wouldn’t want to say “I’m a better teacher than my colleagues in this building because my students like me more.” Not kosher. Beyond that, you wouldn’t even be able to find other teachers who measure their NPS.
2. There are so many reasons why a student might give you a certain 0-10 score, and a lot of those reasons might not be related to learning at all. Maybe they like you because they think you’re cool. Maybe you let them sleep in class. Maybe you throw the best classroom holiday parties. Just because a student is extremely likely to recommend you doesn’t mean they’d recommend you because you help them learn.

Those are two immediate limitations if you choose to use NPS. It’s one way to measure your success as a teacher, but certainly there are other (and probably better) ways to do that.

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There you have it. In the business world, NPS is a core measurement for customer experience. In the classroom, it can be used as a measurement for student experience. I suggested NPS as one way that I could’ve measured how well-liked I was by my students. By adding the two NPS questions to a mid-quarter survey, I could’ve quantified how likely they were to recommend me to a friend, peer, or another student at our school.

So let me ask you: What’s your NPS as a teacher? How likely are your students to recommend you to a friend, peer, or another student your school? Why?

If you have questions about NPS or how you can measure it in your classroom, then send me a message and we can set aside time to discuss it more.