Occurs During Learning: the second characteristic of effective feedback

For those that know anything about formative assessment, this second characteristic of effective feedback is a necessity.  In this section Chappius asserts that:

Feedback can encourage students to see mistakes as leading to further learning if you plan time for students to take the actions suggested, before asking them to demonstrate their level of achievement for a mark or grade.  The time we spend giving feedback may be wasted if we do not build in time for them to act on it. 

For this to work optimally, the classroom climate has to shift so mistakes are welcomed in as much as they result in opportunities for further learning.  They provide information about miscommunication, missteps, and gaps; all of which can be corrected with further instruction and practice.

Because feedback can be time intensive, it is so important to use it effectively.  Time must be built in.  Nothing is more important than ensuring that students have learned the material- not coverage, not a pacing plan.  Nothing.  I like to move quickly, so to remind myself of this idea, I am printing out a turtle to hang on my back wall.  This way I will see it while I am teaching and remind myself to slow down, model, check for understanding, reteach (if necessary), give students adequate time to practice and improve.  And then, only then, move on.  Anything worth teaching is worth teaching well. 

Photo from fredsharples

Directing Attention: the first characteristic of effective feedback

Chappius offers a key question in this section: "Can this student take action on the basis of this comment?" (pg.60).  Inherent in this question is differentiation.  Some students in the class may be able to take action, but can this, individual, student on whose paper the comment is written take action.  By "this comment" Chappius is pointing back to her earlier statement that effective feedback should point to success, which is genuine and specifically linked to intended learning, and/or point to intervention, which should "identify a correction, describe a specific feature or quality that needs work, or point out an ineffective or incorrect use of strategy or process."  Does the feedback I wrote on the paper do this for my students?  Does it provide each with information about what he/she did well and what he/she needs to do next?  Or do I just try to give them enough information to justify the grade that they were given?

This last question gets to the heart of the verb of Chappius' key question: "take action."  Students need to be given opportunities to take action- what formative assessment is all about.  If the feedback does not create opportunities to take action, the feedback is worse than worthless- it is a waste of time.

Strategy 3: Offer Regular Descriptive Feedback

Chappius gives 5 characteristics of effective feedback:
1. directs attention to the intended learning,
2.  occurs during learning,
3.  addresses partial understanding,
4.  does not do the thinking for the student, and
5.  limits correctives to what students can act on

Taken together, these five characteristics are a useful distillation of much of the other reading I have done in the area of feedback.  Since Chappius lists Brookhart as a source, this does not come as a surprise. However, I do want to take the time to visit each of these five in turn to see what additional insight I can glean.

Photo by Phil Roeder

Highlighting Work that Misses the Mark

Yes, yes, I have heard it before.  It is important to show models of the learning target so students are able to conceptualize what the finished product will/should look like.  However, based on the reading I have done over the past several months, there seems to be some disagreement when it comes to sharing weak or poor examples of a learning target.  Some say that weak examples are unnecessary and serve no real purpose for students who should be focusing on quality.  Contrarily, Chappius asserts that showing students models of weak work helps them to understand problems to avoid.  I do not make a habit of using models of poor work, but after thinking about Chappius' argument, I can see how it can be helpful.  However, I think it is only helpful if students are actively engaged with understanding, evaluating, and explaining what makes one sample weak and another strong.  If they are able to explain what makes a certain writing piece weak or less effective, they are more likely to avoid similar shortcomings in their own writing. 

Starting a New Book: Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning

I have recently begun reading Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning by Jan Chappuis and am finding it quite informative thus far.  The seven strategies are organized under Where am I going?, Where am I now?, and How can I close the gap?.  In and of themselves, this grouping is not unique to Chappuis, nor does she assert that they are her creation.  However, what I am appreciating thus far is her clear organizational structure that is aiding in my ability to make connections among the texts I have read by seeing them within Chappuis' organizational framework.  So far,  I have only covered the first two strategies (provide students with a clear and understandable vision of learning target and use examples and models of strong and weak work), but I already can see how the elements are fitting together.  I will follow-up with additional postings to track my progress through this book, but in the meantime, I wanted to leave by sharing a link to a webinar created by the publishing company to cover the Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning.

Enrich and Reteach

An Arizona elementary school structures their schedule around incorporating formative assessment school-wide through their Enrich and Reteach program.  Based on this video, I believe Popham would consider them a level four school.  The aspect I appreciated is that it created enrichment for students who needed it; it is not only those who are behind who need help.  Students who are above grade level can easily get bored with grade level curriculum and the reteaching that occurs of that curriculum.  Another aspect that seems to come out of the process was reflective conversation by the grade level team as they compare their assessments and determine who is best to run the reteaching.

Moving On Up: level two formative assessment and students' learning tactic adjustments

In W. James Popham's Transformative Assessment, he outlines his four levels of formative assessment; today I want to focus on level two, which "deals with students' use of formative assessment evidence to adjust their own learning tactics."  Although teacher do play an important role as a facilitator in level two, the students are the ones who make the decisions through gathering evidence, evaluating performance indicators, and modifying any learning tactics that should be changed.

In order to unpack this chapter a bit, let's start with the term learning tactic.  A learning tactic is defined as "the way a student is trying to learn something" (71).  For example, many of my students struggle with studying for their anatomy class.  When I have asked what they do to study, they answer with learning tactics: re-reading, trying to answer the questions in the back, looking over the bold faced words, reviewing lecture notes and handouts, etc.  

Based on evidence gathered through assessment feedback, students should be able to determine how well or poorly they did at approaching the target.  From this point, each student needs to evaluate his/her learning tactics to see how effective they are at helping him/her approach the learning target for the curricular aim.  For example, I just gave my students an in-class essay test on the first act of Macbeth.  They were given the prompts well ahead of time, so they knew how they would be assessed.  I even showed them exactly how points would be given by using a few example sentences I wrote.  Students were allowed to take notes, and I suggested several learning tactic suggestions that I have found to be successful for other students (ie: asking yourself the prompt and brainstorming to see how many facts you can come up with, re-reading the prompts after every scene to see what info you can add to your notes that would be useful for the test, etc).  However, though I tried to offer several learning tactics, it is evident from some of the grades that at least a few students decided to go about it their own way.  I talked to one student a few minutes after she turned in her failing exam.  I asked her what she did to prepare for the test; she said that she had decided to just "write stuff" and see how it went.  This is, obviously, an inefficient learning tactic.  My next step is to have her and the rest of my students evaluate their performance, reflect of learning tactics used, and explain whether they should or should not adjust their learning tactics for their next essay test, which should take place next week.  I use the word "should" because, as Popham reminds, "it should remain each student's individual choice as to whether to modify or stick with current learning tactics" (83).

Popham cautions against using grades for formative assessment, and though I understand his reasoning, from the example above, it is clear that I have not taken his advice.  I am not yet sure how to reconcile this with my need to assign points and a grade that can be placed in a gradebook for parents and students to monitor.

Notes from a Formative Assessment Blogger

In "Is REAL Formative Assessment Even Possible", author Bill Ferriter shares his commitment to, frustrations with, and suggestions for formative assessment practice in the classroom.  After reading his blog, I feel better able to consider some of the road bumps I have been feeling as I have spent more time intentionally focusing on formative assessment.

Flailing in the Deep End

As I am still working my way through my research, I have begun to feel like I am flailing around in the deep end of a pool rather than gliding across the water.  I  have read enough about the subject to feel quite confused about how all I am reading fits together.  So, to help realign myself, I want to write a short list of what I know to be true about formative assessment.  This list is in no way comprehensive.
1.  Formative assessment is not a designation; it is a response.
2.  Both the teacher and student have an active role in the formative assessment process.
3.  For effective formative assessment to take place, there must first be a clear learning target.
4.  Formative assessment is ongoing.
5.

Is it sad that I can only come up with four?  See, I need floaties.

Instruction should not be . . .

Instruction should not be a Ouija-boardlike game in which teachers guess about what to do next.  Educating kids is far too important for that sort of approach.  Rather, instructing students should be a carefully conceived enterprise in which decisions about what to do next are predicated on the best available information.- W. James Popham

That information comes through formative assessment practices.

Dollops of Feedback

 

"The most powerful single modification that enhances achievement is feedback.  The simplest prescription for improving education must be dollops of feedback." - John Hattie

Photo by Ann

Cycle of Excellence

        

“Students must have routine access to the criteria and standards for the task they need to master; they must have feedback in their attempts to master those tasks; and they must have opportunities to use the feedback to revise work and resubmit it for evaluation against the standard. Excellence is attained by such cycles of model-practice-perform-feedback-perform” - Grant Wiggins

Photo by Don Bergquist

Feedback for Struggling Students

Brookhart describes struggling students as those who "don't have solid prior learning experiences or don't have the learning skills to process the information;" she includes "both learning disabled students and students who, though not identified with a learning deficiency, did not get the foundation they needed as learners."

For these students, a teacher should use feedback that focuses explicitly on process, so students can become more aware of how they learn.  By pointing out which strategies students are employing, students can become more proficient at monitoring their own learning behavior and cognitive processing.

Though criterion-referenced feedback is advocated consistently by Brookhart, for struggling students she suggests self-referenced feedback when the work the student produced is too far "off the mark" to make the comparison helpful. 

It is true that they need to know their work doesn't meet the target, but most struggling students already know that.  Feedback that communicates "off by a mile" or a list of necessary improvements that is longer than the original assignment simply generates hopelessness.  For these students, self-referenced feedback can bridge the gap.

So, what is self referenced feedback?

[It] compares a student's work today with his or her own previous past performance or with your expectations for this student based on that past performance. 

 It must be concrete and it must be authentic.  It will not help students to receive empty praise or misguided encouragement.  The desired effect is improvement-perhaps incremental and slow- but improvement nonetheless.  To make improvement, students need to feel that improvement is possible- it is within their grasp.  Seeing it a mile off will not help struggling students feel motivated to start on the journey. 

What would this look like?  If the whole class is working on essay writing, and a struggling student turns in one paragraph, the teacher should provide feedback on the paragraph, commenting on the ways in which this paragraph is an improvement (if it in fact is) over previous paragraph writing done by the student.  If a student turns in a writing piece that does not live up to his or her previous performance, the teacher should have a conversation with the student, showing him/her the last writing piece and having him/her redo the current assignment so it is at least as good as the last one.

Improvement is the goal, and since it looks different for every student, the feedback needs to be differentiated as well.

Next Steps: Feedback for Advanced Students

No matter how successful a student is, there is always more that can be learned .

It can be all too tempting to scrimp on feedback for students who are advanced because they are doing fine without it (in fact, this is the same argument for getting rid of GATE services and programs in many districts across the US).  However, this would be a mistake.  Learning is a process and advanced students have not arrived at the end of that process simply because they can demonstrate mastery of grade level concepts and skills. 

According to Brookhart, advanced students benefit from the same type of feedback that all other students benefit from: task and process focused, criterion-referenced, positive, clear, and specific.  Feedback for advanced students, just like for all students, needs to feed-forward.  Though an advanced student may have fulfilled the requirements of the assignment, flawlessly even, a teacher can still use feedback to provoke thought and offer further direction, making "a suggestion for a next step, mindful that the next step may be an enrichment of the basic learning goals."

Feedback that Feeds

This paragraph is just too rich not to quote verbatim.

Make sure you go over the last unit's test or assignment before launching into the next unit or assignment.  Feedback isn't "feedback" unless it can truly feed something.  Information delivered too late to be used isn't helpful.  Make sure when you give feedback that there is time built in to actually use the information.  Otherwise students will quickly learn to ignore feedback.  - Susan M. Brookhart in How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students

Photo by Wayne MacPhail

Using Feedback with Summative Assessment

The intention of feedback is to be formative, to help students learn.  However, some excellent opportunities for providing feedback come after summative events.

Though a unit may have ended, it is never to late for feedback to be effective.  So, how should a teacher provide feedback after a summative assessment?  Susan M. Brookhart offers a few suggestions in her aptly titled How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students.

1.  Allow students to resubmit the same assignment.  I do this for the research paper my students write, and I find that it is effective at getting students to revise and incorporate the feedback. The obvious draw back...it takes a lot of time.  However, a more subtle drawback can be that the assessment changes from "indicating the achievement of certain learning goals to indicating the ability to follow the teachers directions."  Depending on how thoroughly the teacher "corrected" the errors in the paper, the student may just go through on auto-pilot and change what has been identified.  Therefore, the student is not demonstrating their mastery of commas; instead, he/she is demonstrating my mastery of commas.  I can see Brookhart's point, but I think that there are ways around this drawback if the teacher provides judicious feedback that asks questions and requires the student to problem solve instead of providing answers through extensive marking.
  
2. Provide students with another similar assignment where they can incorporate the feedback into a new situation, thereby extending their learning.  To do this, Brookhart suggests:

• for written feedback presented with the return of summative assessments (tests or assignments), explicitly tell the students when they will be able to use the feedback.

The benefit of this is that students will be more likely to read through feedback and perhaps reflect on it since they have a concrete occasion when they will need it in the future, thereby retaining its relevance.

• plan your assessments and assignments so they do give students the opportunities to improve previous work, using feedback to develop skills in writing, problem solving, making presentations, doing research, or studying.

To me this looks like deliberate scaffolding of process skills.  Though this second option seems just too easy, based on the omission of any stated drawbacks from this approach, Brookhart seems to suggest that this second approach is more effective.  I am not sure that I agree, but I need to give it more thought.  However, I can see how it would work well for a class presentation or project where many of the skills should be practiced and refined throughout a school year, but where redos would be difficult to pull off. 

After reading this section, I still do not see how either relate to large-scale summative assessments (ie: state testing) when the students do not receive their scores back until after the end of the year.  However, both options could work for in-class summative assesments at the end of a unit or project because

All students can benefit from feedback on summative assessment if you provide another opportunity to incorporate it.

Looking at Descriptive Feedback

Not all feedback is good feedback.  In fact, research on feedback has shown that some types of feedback contribute to further learning and some feedback contributes little or nothing to further learning.  Because "Students filter what they hear through their own past experiences, good and bad," it may be helpful to couch feedback in terms that make further learning more likely.  To do this, research says feedback should be descriptive (informative) rather than evaluative.

In order to increase the chances that students will interpret feedback as descriptive, rather than evaluative, a teacher can implement a few practices.
1.  Students should be given several opportunities "to practice and receive feedback without a grade attached."
2. Feedback should describe what can be seen- "how close is it to your learning target? What do you think would help?"

The content of descriptive feedback describes what was done well and why it is good; it also describes what else the student can do to improve both in the task and in the process. Though Brookhart cautions that all feedback needs to be considered in context, she offers multiple examples of feedback that could be considered descriptive: 

Your details strongly support your claim that we should recycle newspapers.  That's great.  Where did you find all those facts?

and

This report probably wouldn't convince a reader who didn't already agree we should recycle.  What else could you do to make a more convincing argument?

Both examples of feedback give the student an area to work on next.

On a personal note, I do point out when students do something well, but I do not always make sure that they understand why I consider it well done.  This is something I need to work on incorporating more deliberately into my feedback.


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A Measuring Stick for Feedback

So, how can I check to see if my feedback is connecting to students?  According to Susan M. Brookhart,

Student response is the criterion against which you can evaluation your own feedback.  Your feedback is good if it gets the following results:

• Your students do learn--their work does improve.
• Your students become more motivated--they believe they can learn, they want to learn, and they take more control over their own learning.
• Your classroom becomes a place where feedback, including constructive criticism, is valued and viewed as productive.

Well,this is the measuring stick--my personal performance target. I will revisit it over the next month as I work to improve the quality of feedback that I provide for my students.

Photo by Scott Akerman

Too Much, Too Little, Just Right

I started reading How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students by Susan M. Brookhart, and I am already feeling exceedingly challenged.   The first section was about timing: feedback needs to be timely.  Yep, got it.  I am 100 percent there.  Kids, and adults for that matter, don't care any more if they have moved on from the subject under consideration.  Therefore, the feedback has to be given while it is still on the mind and while there is still something the student can do about it.

The second section was on amount. Screeching halt- perhaps accompanied by audible groaning on my part.  Here is an area that I need a lot of help with.  And Brookhart gets to the heart of the matter by conceding that 

Probably the hardest decision to make about feedback is the amount to provide.  A natural inclination is to want to "fix" everything you see.

Oh, so true.  It is the hardest decision when it comes to feedback because there is so much to write sometimes and not enough time to write it.  Plus, I can easily fall into the trap of copy-editing, which often just overwhelms the students and doesn't really give the student specific ways to approach their next learning steps, if I am not careful.  However, writing "Good" or some other such nebulous comment is also unhelpful it would seem.  To make it even more challenging,

For real learning, what makes the difference is a usable amount of information that connects with something the students already knows and takes them from that point to the next level. 

The words that I fixate on in this sentence are the words usable and connects.  For feedback to be usable, it has to meet the student where he or she is at developmentally. Right now, at the beginning of the year, it is difficult to keep all of my students' names straight- let alone understand where they are at developmentally.  Furthermore, for feedback to connect, students have to hear it in such a way that they can see how it relates to their current performance and gives them a direction for improvement.  This means that it needs to not be too little or too much because both create confusion for the student. Which leaves one question: What is just right?   

Judging the right amount of feedback to give--how much, on how many points--requires deep knowledge and consideration of the following:

• The topic in general and your learning target or targets in particular 
• Typical developmental learning progressions for those topics or targets
• Your individual students

This is difficult, and I can honestly say that I struggle with giving feedback that I can truly say advances the learning of my students.  I give feedback, but I do not know to what extent is has been usable or has connected to the students- to what extent it is just right.   However, it is an important part of the formative assessment process and I am not going to get better without practicing and going through the process.  Just like in the story of Goldilocks, just right always came after too much and too little.  Right?

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For a Bird's Eye View

Brookhart published an article called "Feedback that Fits" in Educational Leadership, which serves as a summary or overview of How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students.

Photo by Rajesh Vijayarajan Photography

New Books

I received three new books, which I plan to work my way through in the next month.  They are (with accompanying fanfare)-