Never Work Harder Than
Your Students & Other Principles
of Great Teaching
Jackson, Robyn R. (2009). Never Work Harder Than Your Students &
Other Principles of Great Teaching. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Principle 5: Use Effective Feedback
(Chapter 5 – pp. 125-151)
·
Assessing students is not nearly as important
as how we use the assessment data. Assessments should provide feedback to
students that facilitates the learning process and helps students master the
material.
·
Marzano (2003) and Hattie (2009) report that
giving effective feedback is one of the most powerful ways to improve student
learning.
·
Effective feedback shows where students are in
relationship to the objectives and what they need to do to get there. It also
helps us to revise our instructional approach in order to better meet students’
needs.
·
We need to help students collect and analyse
their own data and understand what their grades really mean.
·
Collect feedback from a variety of sources not
just tests: student – student interactions, discussions, student questions,
quizzes, worksheets, experiments …
·
Formative assessments such as these occur
during the learning process and provide students with feedback which will help
them to improve their process or product before the final assessment.
·
Formative assessments may also reveal that
your students have already mastered the material and you can move on in your
unit.
·
Coaching students towards better performance
involves:
- Focusing your feedback on the essential elements of the assignment only.
- Directly relating your feedback to the learning goal.
- Ensuring that your feedback is specific to the learning goal but don’t do the work for them.
- Using language that the students can understand.
- Giving students the opportunity to act on the feedback that you give them.
·
When students fail it is important to give
them honest feedback about why they failed and how they can do better next
time.
Try these ideas:
1. Try to balance your use of formal tests,
performance tasks and informal or formative assessments so that you can collect
a variety of data.
2. Encourage students to collect and reflect on
their own learning through use of things like journals or portfolios.
3. Use
pre-assessments to determine how you will differentiate the teaching and
learning in your lessons. Help students to use this pre-test to set their own
goals for learning.
4. Give students opportunities to give peer
feedback to each other. Make sure that students are clear about the performance
criteria before they give the feedback.
5. Give some assignments just for practice and do
not grade them. That way you can help students focus on learning rather than
earning a grade.
·
If possible, provide students with
opportunities to retake assessments or resubmit unsuccessful assignments.
Try these ideas:
1. To cut down on the number of retakes, tell the
students clearly what will be in the assessment and how they will be graded.
2. Refuse to allow students to take a failing
grade rather than retake a test/ redo an assignment. In this way they will have
to re-engage with the material.
3. Require students to engage in some sort of
corrective action before they retake the test.
4. Set deadlines and communicate them clearly.
You shouldn’t have to spend all of your spare time re-assessing students.
·
In order for feedback to be useful it needs to
be done quickly. How can we do this? Focus on quality over quantity which will
mean less marking overall. Also by giving feedback that is targeted to specific
learning goals we don’t need to mark the whole piece of work that the student
has completed.
Professional Readings
- Do you have students who have bad listening skills? TED talk: Julian Treasure - "5 ways to listen better."
- Shame is not the solution. An opinion piece by Bill Gates (and sent to me by Renee) focusing on the likelihood that in the USA teachers’ individual performance assessments will be made public and what a mistake this is.
Educational Leadership - two recent volumes are now in the library. As well as feature articles, these journals also have monthly columns, including "Research says" by Bryan Goodwin, "Art and Science of Teaching" by Robert J. Marzano and "One to Grow On" by Carol Ann Tomlinson.
Effective Grading Practices
November 2011 | Volume 69 | Number 3
Feature Articles
- Perspectives / What We Learn from Grades - Marge Scherer
- Starting the Conversation About Grading - Susan M. Brookhart. At the heart of the matter: What are the purposes of grading?
- Five Obstacles to Grading Reform - Thomas R. Guskey. How to surmount the tyranny of tradition and bring thoughtful change to an established practice.
- Redos and Retakes Done Right - Rick Wormeli. Why allowing retakes is worth the trouble and practical tips for managing them.
- The Case Against Grades - Alfie Kohn. We should abolish all grades as antithetical to learning, the author argues.
- Grades That Show What Students Know - Robert J. Marzano and Tammy Heflebower. Four best practices for schools that want to implement a standards-based grading system.
- Reporting Student Learning - Ken O'Connor and Rick Wormeli. Problems with—and practices for—making grading accurate, consistent, and meaningful.
- No Penalties for Practice - Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and Ian Pumpian. An urban secondary school refines its intervention efforts by focusing on competencies.
- Creating Student-Friendly Tests - Spencer J. Salend. How to improve teacher-made tests—from writing clearer directions to organizing test items.
- Making Homework Central to Learning - Cathy Vatterott. Well-designed homework can help students master content and do well on assessments.
- How Grading Reform Changed Our School - Jeffrey A. Erickson. A faculty decides that protocols for late work, retests, and evaluating nonacademic factors should be the same for all.
- How I Broke My Rule and Learned to Give Retests - Myron Dueck. A history teacher recounts how he helped his students answer the familiar question, "How am I doing?"
The Resourceful School
December 2011/January 2012 | Volume 69 | Number 4
- Four Takes on Tough Times - Michael A. Rebell, Allan Odden, Anthony Rolle and James W. Guthrie. What priorities should schools set when facing serious cutbacks?
- Turning Crisis into Opportunity - Naomi Calvo and Karen Hawley Miles. Two schools rethink staff, schedule, and student needs.
- Time—It's Not Always Money - Chris Gabrieli. How schools afford—and benefit from—expanded learning time.
- Stretching Your Technology Dollar - Doug Johnson. A director of media's top 10 strategies for knowing how and what to buy, support, or discard.
- Academic ROI: What Does the Most Good? - Nathan Levenson. To wisely reduce costs, evaluate all programs with multiple measures.
- Commentary: Searching for Solutions / Teacher Quality: What's Wrong with U.S. Strategy? - Marc Tucker. It's time to take some lessons from countries whose policies have led to an abundant supply of highly capable teachers.
- Commentary: Searching for Solutions / Privatization: A Drain on Public Schools - James Harvey. The diversion of funds to charter schools and vouchers redirects public funds for private aims.
- Commentary: Searching for Solutions / Changing the Poisonous Narrative: A Conversation with Diane Ravitch - Arnold Dodge. What the corporate reform movement gets wrong, and why it is time for educators to speak up.
- Slowing the Summer Slide - Lorna Smith. Summer learning programs run by private/public partnerships show promise for narrowing the achievement gap.
- A New Vision for Summer School - Jeff Smink. Unfortunately in danger of being eliminated, summer school deserves sustainable and stable funding.
- Coaching Without a Coach - Christina Steinbacher-Reed and Elizabeth A. Powers. When budgets tighten, districts can still keep instructional coaching alive.
- A 21st Century Library in a 20th Century Space - Alanna S. Graboyes. A minor renovation sparks a major improvement.
- The Resilient Leader - Elle Allison. Bouncing back from loss requires practice, practice, practice.
