Feedback - Friend or Foe?
If you know me at all, you know that Formative Assessment is a reoccurring theme in my reading and in my blog posts. The educational guru for formative assessment is Dylan Wiliam and when I ran across his article on The Secret to Effective Feedback a while back, I filed it away in my "to be pondered" folder and then, as is often the case, other priorities took over and I am just now getting back to the article, 20 months later :)
In my classroom, I try to give quite a bit of feedback. I really don't want the first time a student receives feedback from me to be on an assessment, nor do I want the assessment to be the first time I see the student's individual work. As a result, I often use "quick checks" as a warmup or exit ticket with just a couple short problems on it that I can see how a student is progressing with the skill/concept. However, this definitely takes time and ultimately the real question is this...
Source: The Secret to Effective Feedback by Dylan Wiliam
We've probably all read articles about the researcher who decided to see how students would react to various forms of feedback. Some papers received a score or grade, some papers received written comments only, and some papers received both a score and comments. Due to some of these articles, I've tried to move toward more comment based feedback, especially when grading AP Free Response problems or Quick Checks. In general, these formative assessments are purely for students to know how they are doing and for me to know how they are doing.
BUT...
The key to the quote I pasted above is what the students are doing with that feedback.
Earlier this week, I posted a reflection on my yearly goals and how they were progressing. I am using SBG for the 7th or 8th year, but as I continue down the SBG path, I am struggling more with the details. The grade-grubbing that originally led me to SBG is back in full force and the remediation process, the student self-assessment and metacognitive successes I had in the early years seems to be waning.
So, how do I improve?
I want the feedback to be used by students. I want it to be *useful* to students. I want the feedback not only to improve the current student work by letting them see the concepts they still need to work on, but also to help them get to the point of realizing what study methods work for them and what methods don't. I want to help them grow as learners, both today and in the future. I spend a lot of time writing comments, giving feedback, and I really don't want that time to be wasted for me or for my students.
In the article, Wiliam talks about assigning tasks that illuminate student thinking. I need to work on this. One of the things I got away from this fall was exit tickets and it's a goal for me this spring to bring them back. I struggle with exit tickets a lot because how do you move past the surface and really illuminate their thinking? How do you get to the point of really having students articulate their thinking in a way that helps you process the deeper thoughts?
One of my struggles with exit tickets is how they often feel less than useful. You ask a question and students, in their rush to pack up their belongings, just write down things without a second thought. How do you build that metacognitive process? How do you help students understand that you really want them to dig deep and give a serious answer so that you can be a better teacher for them?
1 comment:
And for me the biggest problem with exit slips is I have no idea what to do with them after I give them!
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