“Please Answer This Google Form, Guys”: What Teachers Can Do When Students Don’t Respond
I stood by the classroom door with two minutes left in the period, repeating myself for the third time that week. “Okay, before you leave,” I said, “don’t forget to fill out the Google Form in Classroom. It’s the one about group preferences. If you don’t answer it, I can’t put you in a group you actually like.” A few students nodded. Three opened their laptops right away. The bell rang. Everyone else walked past me, chatting about a video from the night before.
That evening, I checked the responses. Out of 28 students, 11 had answered. The rest had either not opened the link, or opened it and closed it, or maybe planned to do it later and then forgot. The next morning, I typed a reminder in the chat: “please answer this google forms guys, it takes 2 minutes.” I added a crying-laughing emoji, because that’s what you do when you’re trying not to sound annoyed.
It wasn’t the first time, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. The same thing happens with permission slips, retake requests, and the feeding-tube survey from the school nurse. For kids, a Google Form is a tiny piece of digital homework that appears in a stream of other notifications. There’s no bell that rings when you haven’t done it. No one taps you on the shoulder. It just sits there.
I used to take it personally. Then I started watching how students actually move through their day. Between classes, they’re navigating hallways, checking messages, and mentally shifting from one subject to another. By the time they get home, there’s soccer practice, dinner, and maybe an hour of homework they can see — worksheets, reading, math problems. A Google Form doesn’t look like homework. It looks like a survey, which in their minds is closer to spam than to an assignment.
That’s the first thing I had to accept: the form was invisible to them. It wasn’t about disrespect or laziness. It was about how easily small digital requests get buried.
So the second time I sent a Google Form, I did something different. Instead of posting it in the morning and hoping they’d remember, I gave them ten minutes in class. I said, “Let’s just do this now, together.” I put the form up on the projector, read the questions aloud, and walked around the room while they clicked through. A few students asked questions about what “preferred teammate” meant. Most just filled it in. By the end of the period, I had 25 responses. The remaining three were absent that day.
That worked because I stopped expecting students to treat the form like a priority and instead made it part of the routine. It’s the same reason teachers collect homework at the start of class rather than expecting it to be emailed by midnight. Structure helps kids follow through, especially when the task is short but easy to forget.
The tricky part is that not every form fits nicely into class time. Sometimes I need parents to fill one out — a permission slip for a field trip, a family contact update, a request for dinner options at an end-of-year party. Parents are different. They don’t usually ignore forms because they’re distracted by other notifications. They ignore them because they get about forty emails a week and not all of them seem urgent.
I found that parents respond better when they understand the consequence. Instead of writing “Please fill out this form,” I started writing: “I need to order the bus by Thursday. If I don’t get your response, I’ll have to assume your child isn’t coming.” That works surprisingly well. It turns the form into a decision, not a request.
For students, the same idea applies. They need to know what the response is actually for. If I ask them to fill out a survey about their reading habits, I show them the pie chart afterward and say, “Look, half of you said you only read when you have to. Here’s what I’m going to do about that.” When they see the form as something that changes their experience, they’re more likely to remember it.
I also stopped using five questions when I only needed two. Long forms feel like work. Short forms feel like a quick check-in. A student will answer a two-question form in under a minute if they’re already in the room. The same student will close a fifteen-question form because it looks like it might require thinking.
None of this is a perfect system. There’s still one student who swears the link didn’t open on her phone. There’s still a parent who calls me the night before the deadline and asks if the form can be emailed again. And there are still days when I type “please answer this google forms guys” in the chat and hold my breath.
But it’s gotten better. I’ve learned to treat the form as an extension of the classroom, not an item on a to-do list. I make time for it in class. I tell people exactly what I’ll do with the answers. I keep the questions short. I show the results. I don’t assume silence means disinterest — it usually means the request got lost somewhere between the due date and the path from one screen to the next.
The other day, I sent out a form to choose topics for a history project. One student filled it out during study hall and then messaged me: “Mr. A, I picked my topic. Are we supposed to start researching already?” He had read the confirmation screen carefully. He just hadn’t known what to do next.
So I wrote back: “Yes, you can start, but we’ll brainstorm in class tomorrow.”
He replied, “ok sounds good.”
That was it. No big lesson. No dramatic turnaround. Just a small interaction that started with a form he actually answered. Some weeks, that feels like enough.
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