Click Here

Click Here

After five years of teaching GOA Poetry Writing, an online course at Global Online Academy, I continue to learn how to create multi-layered feedback. My students give each other feedback, I give them feedback, and they give me feedback. When it works, we all learn. There’s a sort of triangle effect, and it doesn’t flow in one direction. As a matter of fact, it crosses paths so frequently and with such growing complexity that one challenge is keeping track of all the notes.

Continue Reading

Take a look at how this teacher screencasts a student’s essay with skills-based criteria next to it. With his cursor, he highlights examples of the criteria in the student’s essay and shows where there’s room for growth.

Watch Here

Make decisions about what the feedback will look like and how it will be delivered for your various formative assessments.

Consider the following 4 w’s and 1H:

• • What is the work?

  • Which skill(s)/learning outcome(s) will students receive feedback on?

  • Who should give feedback?

  • Where should it happen?

  • How should students apply the feedback?

Click Here for Template

As teachers look to transition to a competency-based learning approach in their classrooms, one of the major shifts they’ll have to make is moving from grading to feedback. CBL educators prioritize specific, actionable, formative feedback during the learning process, when students can use it, over a focus on calculating and delivering a grade for a summative assessment at the end of a learning experience.

Continue Reading

It's a universal process in education—so universal that we regularly fail to appreciate its complexity. Here's how it goes: (1) A teacher looks at a piece of student work; (2) The teacher writes something on the work (sometimes a grade, sometimes a score, sometimes a comment); and (3) Later, the student looks at what the teacher has written.

Of course, the idea is that what the teacher has written on the student's work improves the student's learning. But as many studies have shown, students often learn less when teachers provide feedback than they do when the teacher writes nothing (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996). The apparently simple process of looking at student work and then giving useful feedback turns out to be much more difficult than most people imagine. We could make the whole process considerably more effective by understanding one central idea: The only important thing about feedback is what students do with it.

Continue Reading

Scaffolding feedback can be an effective way to help students improve their work.

Continue Reading

Students and teachers too often fall into the trap of cranking out work, earning or awarding grades and moving on. Unfortunately, this leaves all parties feeling more urgency than agency when it comes to the work they do and the way they do it. In the worst cases, school becomes about completion and compliance rather than engendering the sense of empowerment and exploration we long for.

Continue Reading

Before a new major assessment, have students complete a four-question reflection based on their previous assessments:

1. What did you need to improve in your previous writing assignments? Be specific. Refer back to comments you received.

2. How did you correct these issues in this essay? What specific changes did you make in drafting and writing this assignment?

3. What remains challenging for you in the writing process? Be specific.

4. Describe the process by which you drafted and wrote this paper. How well does this method work for you? What might you do better next time?

Advice, evaluation, grades—none of these provide the descriptive information that students need to reach their goals. What is true feedback—and how can it improve learning?

Continue Reading