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

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

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.


Photo by DownTown Pictures

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?

Photo by sidknee23

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

Diving into Self-Assessment

After looking at the role of the student in formative assessment, today I am looking more closely at the practice of self-assessment with the help of "Promoting Learning and Achievement through Self-assessment" by Heidi Andrade (an Associate Professor of educational Psychology, the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and the school of Education at the University at Albany, and the co-editor of the Handbook of Formative Assessment).

Andrade delineates self-assessment from self-evaluation (terms that, until now, I have always used interchangeably) by explaining that "self assessment is done on work in progress in order to inform revision and improvement: it is not a matter of having students determine their own grades.  Self-evaluation, in contrast, refers to asking students to grade their own work, perhaps as part of their final grade for an assignment."  By this definition, self-assessment is purely formative in nature, while self-evaluation is more summative.

The purpose of self-assessment is two-fold: (1) "to boost learning and achievement" and (2) "to promote academic self regulation, or the tendency to monitor and manage one's own learning," focusing on both content and meta-cognition.

Andrade offers eight features for effective self assessment to occur.

Students need:

•  awareness of the value of self-assessment;
• access to clear citeria on which to base the assessment;
• a specific task or performance to assess;
• models of self-assessment;
• direct instruction in and assistance with self-assessment;
• practice;
• cues regarding when it is appropriate to self-assess; and
• opportunities to revise and improve the task or performance.

 Though eight features seems like a large number, most of the items on this list will be intuitive in the instruction process, since self-assessment is a skill, just like any other academic skill, that needs to be taught and practiced in order for students to maximize its effectiveness.
 
Though the guidelines above are helpful, the info that I found most helpful was her explanation of the general process that she uses when she has students self assess.  It has three parts: articulate expectations, self-assessment, and revision.

In order to articulate expectations, Andrade states that she "often co-create all or part of a rubric in class by analyzing examples or strong and weak pieces of student work." By interacting with models and discovering criteria, students have a deeper understanding of the specific task and its performance indicators and how to evaluate the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of different approaches.   I like to do this with my students to analyze the genre characteristics of a piece of writing before having them begin their own writing assignment (See Writing Outside Their Comfort Zone for examples of what this process looks like).  The rubric is personal to them because they helped to create it and there is much less student confusion about what each element of the rubric is talking about.  Furthermore, students feel empowered to be successful on the assignment because they know what successful looks like.

In order to have students self-assess writing, Andrade asks students "to use colored pencils to underline key phrases in the rubric, then underline in their drafts the evidence of having met the standard articulated by the phrase."  For example, if the rubric called for using varied transition, students would underline this statement on their rubric in orange and then underline their transitions in orange.  If the paper lacks transitions or the transitions are not varied, students can write themselves a note to address this before they turn in their final draft.  One thing that I like about this is that it ties the rubric closely to the self-assessment process and gives something specific to self-assess. 

For revision, Andrade states that "students are savvy, and will not self-assess thoughtfully unless they know that their efforts can lead to opportunities to actually make improvements and possibly increase their grades." 

According  to the research on self-assessment, "actively involving students in using a rubric to self-assess their work [. . .] has been associated with noticeable improvement in students' performances in writing, social studies, mathematics, science, and external examinations."

Further Reading:

To read more about Andrade's views on rubrics, check out this article


Photo from Joanna Penn

Rick Wormeli on Formative Assessment

"Can [students] learn without formative assessment and the feedback that comes from it? Not at all."

In this video, Wormeli, author of Differentiation, Summarization in Any Subject, and Fair is Not Always Equal, elaborates on the prime importance of formative assessment in the classroom.

Things I took away from the video:

• a teacher can always make a summative assessment formative
• best formative assessment comes with descriptive feedback
• teachers spend too much time creating summative assessments instead of formative assessments

Cultivating Classroom Climate

Photo from Matthewwells.zenfolio.com

"Formative Assessment: an Enabler of Learning" by Margaret Heritage, Assistant Director for Professional Development at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at UCLA, summarizes the teacher's role, the student's role, and the classroom climate during formative assessment.  Though she has many helpful things to say about the teacher's role and the student's role, I gravitated toward her discussion of the classroom climate. 

According to Heritage, the classroom climate is an "essential aspect" of formative assessment, a fact which I have not seen emphasized in my other reading. She offers three aspects.

1.  "Power and responsibility in the classroom is not just the teacher's prerogative, but is distributed so that the teachers and students work together to share responsibility for learning."  While teachers are active in gathering data through multiple measures, student are not passive throughout the formative assessment process.  Instead, they are to be actively engaged in self-assessment, "generating internal feedback that tells them when they need to make adjustments to their learning strategies."  To do this, students need to first understand the learning target, which should be communicated by the teacher, and they need to know what the finished product looks like, which can be effectively accomplished through modeling and a gradual release of responsibility (as outlined by Fisher and Frey). This would also include holding students responsible for utilizing feedback, whether from themselves, their peers, or the teacher to inform their future work.  

2."The classroom has to be a safe place."  This is incredibly important for a class built around formative assessment practices.  For teachers to collect data on student weaknesses or gaps in understanding, students must be willing to share confusion and difficulty without fear of looking stupid.  Some students would rather not turn in an assignment at all rather than risk trying and "failing" at it.  One way to do this is to communicate the purpose of the formative assessment process.  Students need to understand that it is not a "gottcha" experience to prove that the student wasn't paying enough attention during instruction. Instead, it is to help establish next steps so the student can be more successful.  Also, teachers need to be clear to students about learning being a process of growth requiring endurance, not about being "right" and "getting it" immediately.   

3. "The relationships in the classroom must be supportive and collaborative, characterized by mutual trust among teachers and students."  Another element of the student's role is to engage in peer assessment, whereby "peers assess each other's learning against the same indicators that they use to check on their own learning when they are engaged in self-assessment."  To be honest, I have had mixed success with peer assessment.  When I truly reflect on my teaching practices, I have to admit that most of the time I use peer assessment as a step to force students to do one more draft of a paper or assignment before it gets to me.  My hope is that this helps to take care of some of the larger, more obvious issues in a work (ie: missing thesis statements, no internal citations, etc,), so I don't have to grade as many drafts.  This is fine, in theory, and very helpful for getting students to revisit the requirements for the assignment and look for specific aspects.  However, it does not help students to me more aware of their thinking nor does it help them to analyze and evaluating the thinking of others.  On Bloom's taxonomy, my students are identifying/recognizing when they should be on the higher levels, which means that I am cheapening the experience for them.  To improve, I need to work much more deliberately to front load through modeling, think-alouds, and shared writing.  Students need to have a full understanding of what the learning target looks like and what the performance indicators of that target should look like, so the act of peer assessment is more meaningful and increases metacognitive awareness.  



Other Margaret Heritage resources:

Video lecture- Featured presentation from the 5th Annual Iowa High School Summit
Article on Learning Progressions 
Books
Webinar Slides from presentation given in Rhode Island

Four Part Assessment Plan

Teachers who use formative assessments target their instruction to student needs.  Teachers who do not use formative assessments rely on guesswork or generic plans, rather than basing their instructional decisions on data.  

In the article "Formative Assessments in High School," Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey outline their four step approach to formative assessment: feed-up, checking for understanding, feedback, and feed-forward.  During feed-up "a clear purpose should be communicated with students on a daily basis."  The purpose of this is to zero in on the lesson target, so students and teacher know exactly what the focus is.   Checking for Understanding is the second element, and the name of their other book that I just finished reading.  Oral language; questions; writing; projects and performances; and quizzes and tests are mentioned as "excellent ways that teachers can check for student understanding."  The third component is feedback.  What struck me immediately about Fisher and Frey's discussion of feedback is that, though it is important, "feedback by itself has limited impact on student understanding and thus achievement."  Though I can agree that some feedback is like this, from my other reading so far, the right kind of feedback does seems to result in dramatic impact on student understanding and achievement. Fisher and Frey released a new book called The Formative Assessment Action Plan, which fleshes out their ideas in this article, so perhaps it will provide more on this topic.  The last element of the formative assessment system, and its arguably most important part, is feed-forward, which "ensures that data is collected and analyzed for patterns so that the teacher can make informed decisions about what should be taught next.  To accomplish this task, they suggest an error analysis sheet.  "The error analysis sheet is a concrete example of the ways in which formative assessment system can be used to plan instruction" because once the data is gathered and analyzed, the teacher can plan whole class, small group, and one-on-on remediation for specific, targeted skills and content, thus providing the quality instruction and intervention needed.

Photo of labyrinth from vgm8383, who explains "the term labyrinth is often used interchangeably with maze, but modern scholars of the subject use a stricter definition. For them, a maze is a tour puzzle in the form of a complex branching passage with choices of path and direction; while a single-path ("unicursal") labyrinth has only a single Eulerian path to the center. A labyrinth has an unambiguous through-route to the center and back and is not designed to be difficult to navigate."

Quotes: the importance of feedback

“Champions know that success is inevitable; that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. They know that the best way to forecast the future is to create it.”- Michael Gelb, internationally renowned author, speaker, and consultant

 

“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”-Ken Blanchard, leadership expert

 

 

Feedback: the root of it all

 We begin by discussing feedback, the practice in which both assessment and grading have their roots.

While organizing some of my books, I rediscovered Formative Assessment & Standards-Based Grading by Robert J. Marzano, which is the second of his Classroom Strategies that Work series.  (The first Marzano book I read was Classroom Instruction that Works, and I have been blessed to have read several more over the years.)   Though most of this book deals with assessment and grading, the opening deals specifically with feedback.  

Feedback can be given formally or informally in group or one-on-one settings.  It can take a variety of forms. [...] Its most important and dominant characteristic is that it informs the student, the teacher, and all other interested parties about how to best enhance student learning.

The emphasis clearly is on student learning, which, if you read the rest of the book, is the emphasis of grading as well.  Through Marzano's analysis, he found that while feedback provided a positive growth, most of the time, it did not produce positive growth all of the time. 

This, of course, raises the critically important questions, What are the characteristics of feedback that produce positive effects on student achievement, and what are the characteristics that produce negative effects? 

An apt pair of questions indeed.  The conclusion: "negative feedback is that which does not let students know how they can get better" (5).  This conclusion seems to mirror much of the other research that I have found that outlines the need for feedback to be specific and helpful.  Referencing a study by Hattie and Timperley, Marzano continues to explain that

feedback to students regarding how well a task is going (task), the process they are using to complete the task (process), or how well they are managing their own behavior (self-regulation) is often effective, but feedback that simply involves statements like "You're doing a good job" has little influence on student achievement. 

My conclusion:  I need to deliberately work on providing more meaningful feedback.
Credit: Free photos from acobox.com

Feedback: Putting More Air in the Balloon

I received Better Evidence-Based Education, published by John's Hopkins School of Education, in the mail and was thrilled to see that this issue is entitled: Assessment, and it is packed with resources on the topic of my summer investigation.  While skimming through the titles, the first one to catch my eye is "Formative Assessment and Feedback to Learners" by Steve Higgins, a professor of Education at Durham University.

Higgins begins the article by stating its purpose:

One of the questions that teachers have frequently asked me for the review is was about what works in terms of formative assessment and feedback to students.

I love when an author's purpose for writing is so closely aligned with my purpose for reading.

Though it is a bit of an aside, one analogy that caught my attention was comparing test prep to squeezing a balloon.

We know too that simply practicing assessments will improve students' performance, at least in the short term, but this does not help them with their learning. It's rather like squeezing a child's balloon, the bulge you make when you squeeze it makes the balloon look like it is getting bigger, but there is really no more air in there.  Once you let go, it goes back to the size it was before.  Test practice is a bit like this in that the students aren't learning anything new.  You are just squeezing the balloon.  The way you get more air in the balloon is through more effective instruction.  A key component of this is feedback which keeps teaching and learning on track to achieve its goals.(emphasis is mine)

Why feedback? It is central to ensuring that students have what they need to grow.  Upon continuing this article, I realized that it is narrower in scope than I had originally thought, which is a positive in a two page article.  Higgins suggests that teachers give feedback on the task, the process, and self-regulation.  Providing feedback on the task is fairly common sense; however, feedback on process is something that I need to improve.  It just seems to take so long to do.

One finding from the review is that

letting students know when they get things right, and why they are correct is even more important than pointing out mistakes or errors.

The reasoning behind this seems to be that students need to know what they did well to try to better understand the moves for success so they are likely to do it again.  By pointing out what students do correctly, they are also better prepared to draw conclusions or create patterns and heuristics to know why something is correct.  Internalizing why a thing is or is not correct is where the real learning takes place.

photo courtesy of http://medphoto.wellcome.ac.uk/

Feedback that Fortifies

"Fortifies" connotes strength and building up. In addition to castles and parapets, thanks to breakfast cereal and other marvels of modern agriculture, I also think about vitamins and "enriched" carbohydrates.  It is such a good word. In the context of the chapter, Cris Tovani (in So What Do They Really Know?) focuses on feedback that helps students to learn, not just feedback that clarifies why they received the grade they did. 

 Feedback needs to be targeted throughout the teaching and learning cycle because it directs kids back to learning.  Without time to apply the feedback, lengthy comments and conferences are a waste of time.  If I wait and give feedback only when an assignment is due the feedback is too late to be useful" (112).

 Not only is it too late to be useful, it is often just discarded into the trash can, sometimes with only a cursory glance.

Another issue addressed in this chapter is endurance and persisting when confronted with difficult text and assignments.  Tovani asserts that "When students feel unsuccessful, they quit trying because they don't know what else to do."  This makes modeling so important, not just for students, but for everyone.  I do not like cookbooks without pictures because I want to know what it is supposed to look like before I even start cooking.  Crystal clear directions are just not enough.  I need to see the finished product or I do not even want to start.  The only time this is not true is when I am cooking with someone who knows what they are doing. For example, my mom makes a recipe that has been in my family for quite some time.  Though it uses fairly simple ingredients, the process is challenging. In this case, all the pictures of the finished recipe will not help me to feel confident.  This is why I have not made them since I moved out of my parents' house 11 years ago. This summer, while my mom was visiting for two weeks, I had her make the recipe with me.  Then she could get me started and answer questions when I got confused about exactly how warm the warm water was supposed to be.  Even more importantly, she was there to let me know if I was doing something wrong.  The entire process takes at least four hours to complete, so I did not, under any circumstances, want to find out that I had messed up only after pulling the recipe out of the oven. 

I do not always like to give my students an example of a finished product because I fear that it will impinge on creative thinking and result in carbon copies of the example.  However, modeling the process through a think-aloud or shared writing experience is so important to help students to feel more confident and self-assured.  It makes the task seem not so far out of reach.  As Tovani reminds us, "Once learners quit, teachers are in trouble."

Debriefing Round-up: Links from across disciplines

While searching for resources about debriefing, I stumbled upon the links below.    

Carrie Caudle, who teaches Improv Theater, at Improv Education explains how she formats her debriefing sessions to include student input on their observations- "What did you notice?", reactions- "How did it feel to...?", connections- ""How is this like...?", and change- "What are you going to do differently next time?"

Support Real Teachers, a support website for PE teachers, provides debriefing sentence stems I found valuable.

I came across quite a few articles dealing with debriefing after simulation activities in nursing and other medical training. One such article aptly named  "The Essentials of Debriefing in Simulation Learning: a concept analysis" (originally published in Nursing Education Perspectives) elaborated on the idea that "By providing opportunities to review events and make visible their meaning, debriefing offers a way to draw out student thinking and help students develop their complex decision-making skills."

Performance Learning Systems asserts that debriefing activities can utilize one or more of three objectives: summarize curriculum information, evaluate interpersonal skills, and identify the thinking process.  For each of these objectives, a list of questions or topics follows.  In addition to encouraging metacognition, identifying the thinking process (included below) would encourage transfer as well.

• What types of thinking did you use while doing the activity?
• How did you come up with the generalizations or conclusions you derived from the activity?
• What path did your mind follow to get to those ends?
• Could your thinking have taken an easier path? A different path?
• Did you develop any new thinking patterns by doing the activity?
• What strategies did you use to complete the activity?
• Could your thinking processes be applied to any other learning situations?

Debriefing

From my reading of So What Do They Really Know? by Cris Tovani, I have been doing some thinking about debriefing. At the end of her chapter outlining her workshop model, Tovani cautions:

Make sure you don't skimp on time to debrief.  This crucial component of the workshop model provides an opportunity for students to reflect on their learning.  Regular opportunities to debrief not only hold students accountable for the way they use their work time, but also give teachers a second chance to assess what students need next.  Allowing students to collect their thoughts at the end of the period and share new learning makes others in the class smarter. The debriefing also gives the teacher insight into students' patterns of understanding and confusion.

Though debriefing is hardly a new component to lesson design, it it often overlooked as it occurs at the end of the lesson.  However, it is an important part of the lesson design for several reasons:

• it encourages metacognition
• it allows students to share their learning with others
• it encourages transfer and interaction with overarching ideas and patterns
• it is a type of formative assessment
• it guides upcoming learning experiences

From my own experience, debriefing can take a variety of forms:

• exit slips
• small group share out
• journaling
• whole class discussion

Tovani emphasizes the importance of monitoring students as they engage in the lesson and recording data to share with the class during debriefing.  These recordings could be notes about content or group process.  The problem with this, as even Tovani points out, is that the teacher can not sit at his/her desk and grade while students are working. Though Tovani does not mention in this chapter how she works around this, I am assuming (based my initial perusal of the table of contents) that she will touch on this topic in greater detail later in the book