Feedback - picking them up and moving them on

For many, marking is the bane of the teacher's existence. I, however, love it, for it is the perfect opportunity to give feedback. Feedback is your opportunity as an educator to have a personal conversation with each student about their learning, what they did well, what they need to improve and how they can do better. As such, done well, it is a massive opportunity for you to engage students by celebrating their successes and then granting them agency to achieve meaningful goals. 

So, what are the key ingredients? Given I did my PGCE in 2011, unsurprisingly I use the acronyms WWW, EBI and DIT. That is:
  • What went well  
  • Even better if
  • Directed improvement task
However, while many teachers tend to focus on the latter two, I want to suggest that the first one, the WWW, is actually the most important.  

Put yourself in the shoes of a mid-level student: you try your hardest, really revise and prepare, put your best into a piece of work, and when that comes back all the emphasis is placed upon what you need to do to improve. It would be quite disheartening, I imagine (and vaguely remember). 

Instead, use feedback to firstly celebrate successes - highlight what the student has done well. Perhaps literally: highlighting in green the positive points they made or nice turns of phrase. I often have a pre-printed bullet point list of attributes I am looking for in a student's assignment which I can simply highlight in green to show what they have succeeded at including. Saves me a huge amount of time, but also means that the student gets a huge amount of positive feedback. This is motivating. This is engaging.

Obviously, looking forward it important too, but make sure that your feedback is practical and actionable. Sometimes, I find the need to distinguish between what could be done to improve the current piece of work and a target for the future: they may be the same, they may not be. 

Another tip is NOT to give a grade, at least not at first. If you give the students a mark, that will be all they see. If you want them to digest your feedback, both the positive and negative, hold this back. 

Finally, don't feel that all this feedback needs to come from you: properly guided, students can give effective and accurate feedback to each other. Another time saver for tired teachers. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Questioning: Agree, Challenge, Extend

Image
 Questioning is a core part of teaching. Yet, as you badger away at an individual student, drilling down to see what they know and how deep their learning goes, how do you involve the rest of the class? One finger = agree Students in agreement with the answer/statement/opinion raise one finger. Two fingers = challenge Students who disagree with or want to challenge an answer can signal with two fingers. This is great - how often have you asked another student (or a series of students) only to hear the same opinion as the first student you asked? This way you can immediately jump to the dissenting voice. Three fingers = extend (or build, as I've also seen it called) Students who agree, but for different reasons than stated, or who want to extend the answer, can signal with three fingers. Train your classes to do this as students answer. Suddenly, you can see where the whole class is, and suddenly they are all participating and thus have an even greater reason to invest in listening
Read more

Jenga! - a metaphor for how writers use tension

Image
 I love finding ways to get games into the classroom (if you've read any of my other posts, you may have noticed). It is a great way to immediately amp up the students' engagement and energy levels. Many of the others I've written about - beep, bingo, taboo - can work in any subject. This one, I'm afraid, is purely for those Literature teachers among us... Jenga is a tense game. Therefore, I use it as a metaphor for tension in a text. I literally get the students to play Jenga as we read a tense moment of a text. Favourite moments for this include: Romeo & Juliet Act 3 Scene 5; the bit with Candy's dog in Of Mice and Men ; and when Fi gatecrashes the wedding in KE Salisbury's the face that pins you . As I'm reading I call people up to take a turn. The other students will get massively distracted, but at this point you pause (maybe while a student has half pulled out a brick) and ask the students if they are enjoying the lesson. "Yes!" they
Read more

Beep! - an engaging reading activity for any topic

For my first post, the ultimate time-efficient reading game: Beep! It's super simple. As you read a text out loud to the class, you make deliberate mistakes e.g. you say Calcium Oxide instead of Calcium Carbonate; you swap Chile for China; you muddle etre and avoir . The students must follow along in their own copies and shout "Beep!" if/when they spot the mistake. Keep a score (you can also deduct points for premature beeping). Any one student who dominates (e.g. that sole native speaker in a class of language learners), make them the scorer or even get them to take over the reading and mistake making. This works on many levels: for a start, it's fun in way that reading a large chunk of text often isn't. However, in order to play students must read along with you. How often do we suspect/know that half the class has drifted off while you read aloud, even if you get the students to take turns? Beep gets them reading word for word! Finally, you can of cours
Read more