Julia G. Thompson

January 1, 1970

Welcome to Issue Eighteen!

“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.” ~Gallieo

Few students have ever gone through school without the experience of laboring on an assignment only to have it returned covered in exasperated red ink. Several years ago the trend was for teachers to forgo red ink--as if those terse comments would somehow be less harsh in purple, green, or orange. Today’s educators, however, know that there are many different ways to offer feedback--the constructive criticism, advice, reinforcement, and comments that can help students learn--regardless of color.

Now that all of the desks are moved and procedures are clearly established, many of us finally have time to work on the skill and the art of delivering instructional feedback that encourages students to do their best and to learn from their mistakes. Below you will find suggestions to make the skill and the art of productive feedback one of your strengths as an educator.

The First Step: Know Your Students

Some students are more sensitive than others and can react in a negative way to even the mildest comment from a teacher or other adult. Although building trust with all students is important, it is especially so with those students whose egos are clearly fragile. One of the most important ways to begin to build trust is to get to know your students. Here are some ways that you can learn about those intriguing people who spend their school days with you.

• Speak with previous teachers, being careful to elicit a balanced, professional response instead of an emotional reaction.
• Carefully study your students’ permanent records.
• Observe your students as they work to look for specific information such as relationships with classmates, how they approach a test, or what causes off-task behavior.
• Pay attention to body language. Many emotions are telegraphed unconsciously through body language.
• Talk with parents and family members. Ask them to fill out questionnaires or write brief notes about their child.
• Give students inventories to assess their learning styles.
• Ask students to write personal responses to various topics through journals, exit slips, or learning logs.
• Notice how students relate to each other in casual settings and during group work.
• Ask students to describe themselves. You can ask for this in writing or during personal conferences.
• Offer students icebreakers and team-building exercises and then pay attention to their interactions with each other.

“It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mistakes to Avoid

Feedback can take several forms. It can be oral or written, informal or formal, and can offer formative assessments as well as summative assessments. No matter which form you employ at any given moment, giving appropriate feedback is a delicate and complex task that requires planning and diplomacy if it is to be successful. Some of the most common mistakes that teachers make in giving feedback are ones that can be easily avoided with just a bit of forethought.

• Make sure that what you have to say is specific. Telling a child “Good job!” is a pleasant compliment and offers praise, but is not specific enough so that students know what they’ve done that’s correct. Make a point of giving feedback that is specific rather than vague.
• Don’t forget that every comment that you make has a positive or negative effect on your relationship with your students. Students pay attention to what you say to their classmates as well as to themselves. Be careful that what you say will have a positive effect.
• Don’t just edit a student’s paper. Ask questions that will enable students to self-correct. In order to be useful, students should be able to correct or prevent mistakes by paying attention to your feedback questions and comments.
• Don’t forget to offer strategies for improvement. Just pointing out what went wrong may be helpful, but showing students how to improve sets a positive tone that allows learning to happen.
• Try to avoid being subjective when you can. Telling students, “I don’t like it when you…” or “This is ridiculous!” only states your opinion. Instead, telling students, “Your capital letters are extremely neat and well-shaped” takes the personal factor out of the comment while putting the focus on the student’s work and not on an adult opinion. Offer facts instead of your opinions as often as possible.
• Don’t overwhelm students with too many comments at once. Although your comments have to support the grade decision when you are grading a final effort on an assignment in a summative evaluation, in general, flooding a paper with corrections of every minor mistake will not help students improve. Select a few errors as a focus and deal with those specific problems in depth.
• Don’t forget to include positive comments. Students benefit from knowing what they did right as well as what they did wrong.
• Don’t neglect to proofread what you say. In the rush to grade papers, many teachers don’t take the time to look over their comments. Check for errors in syntax as well as tactfulness after you have gone over a stack of papers. Ask yourself how you would react to those comments. How will the student? How will the students’ parents or guardians?
• Don’t take too long to return papers with constructive feedback. Although every teacher at every grade level feels overwhelmed at times by the onerous task of grading papers, it is important for students to get that information from you quickly so that they can apply it to what they already have learned.

“It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.” ~Epicurus

Formative Feedback Strategies

Instead of waiting until students have committed mistakes and then playing “Gotcha” with them, offer frequent opportunities during the course of a lesson or unit of study for students to let you know how they are doing. Try some of these strategies to determine your students’ progress.

• Ask students for suggestions on how they can learn the information better.
• Give students a checklist to gauge their knowledge or skill level. Have them check the items that they feel confident about and use the results to see what you need to reteach or emphasize.
• Begin a lesson with an outline of the information that you will cover and ask students to track progress and their mastery by using their outlines.
• At a good stopping point in a lesson, ask students to complete a graphic organizer with the information covered so far.
• Pay attention to body language. Your students telegraph both negative and positive reactions through their body language.
• Don’t ask, “Are there any questions?” Instead, ask students to write one thing that they may not be sure of and share it with the class.
• Use the rubrics that you give at the start of an assignment as periodic checkpoints.
• Ask students to keep learning logs where they can comment on their progress.
• After you have taught a chunk of information, have students summarize or paraphrase the information you have just covered.
• As you move about the room when your students are working independently, ask them to tell you one question they have about their work.
• If your school offers it, use an electronic response system where students can click in their answers and have instant feedback.
• Have students play online games or complete other activities that you have developed. A Web site that your school may have an account with is: www.quia.com. At Quia, you can create online tests, quizzes, and other interactive activities.
• Periodically stop and have students write questions about the lesson and share those questions with the class.
• Have students write responses on whiteboards and hold them up for you and their classmates to see.
• Ask students to restate the directions or an important concept.
• Have students circle a question or problem that they are unsure of. They can also mark the ones that they are confident about.
• Begin class by asking students to complete sentences such as these, “I was wondering…” or “I am not sure about…” or “I don’t understand…”
• In groups, ask students to evaluate each others’ work and then ask questions that concern the entire group.
• Ask students to rate their knowledge on a scale of 1-5.
• Pass out stickers and have students place them beside their best and worst answers.
• Ask students to predict their grades before an assignment. Use their predictions to discuss concerns.

"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." ~Vincent Van Gogh

How to Encourage Student Self-Correction

The most important goal of effective and constructive feedback is that students will take their teacher’s comments and learn from them. One of the most frustrating aspects of giving students feedback is that sometimes we feel as if we focus on the same errors all term long. Having to repeatedly remind students of the same mistakes is not an activity designed to make any teacher feel productive.

Don’t just give feedback without also designing some way for students to act upon what you have said. Asking them to correct their errors, write explanations for their mistakes, or tell a partner how they could have done better are just some of the ways that you can involve students in learning from their mistakes.

Make every assignment into a formative assessment by including a final activity where students evaluate their work based on your feedback. Here are some suggestions to help students learn from their mistakes so that they can integrate the corrections and comments you offered into their learning and so you can move on to help your students in other ways.

• Ask students to respond to open-ended questions such as “How could you have improved this section?” or “What could you have done differently to prepare this assignment?”
• Have students write corrections directly on their papers rather than just glance at the grade and file away the paper.
• Give students a chart with spaces to record their errors and their corrections.
• Have students correct their papers while working in pairs with other students to gather insight and advice.
• Put students in groups of three or four to talk over their common mistakes and how they can avoid those errors in the future.
• Ask students to keep a record of how they have improved their work. This can be a powerful document as students see how they have improved all year long.
• Have students keep a list of their own mistakes so that they can refer to it as they work on other assignments.
• After you pass back graded assignments, have students write comments to each other on self-sticking notes attached to the paper. Use one color for corrections and another for positive comments.
• Ask students to write a response to the topic: “If I Could Do This Over, I Would Do These Things".

"Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was." ~Robert Louis Stevenson

How to Manage Your Time at School So That Your Life Is Not Consumed by Grading Papers

• Create routines to make your workdays predictable and manageable.
• Ask your colleagues for suggestions when you create lesson plans. They may have plans, worksheets, activities, or other ideas to share with you.
• Research the Internet for lesson ideas, worksheets, and other helpful timesavers.
• Do a task right the first time so that you don’t have to redo it.
• If you can share a time-consuming task with colleagues, you will save time, learn from their experience, and have fun, too.
• Write down things you will need to remember.
• Plan how you will use your planning time at school. If you don’t plan, those brief moments will slip away.
• Don’t be tempted to aimlessly chat with colleagues instead of working productively in your spare time at school.
• Break a large task into smaller, manageable ones.
• Learn to schedule your work according to the times of day when your energy is high.
• Use small blocks of time. You can accomplish a lot in just a few minutes.
• If you don’t understand something, ask. If you need help, ask.
• Keep your work area uncluttered and organized so you don’t have to search for misplaced items.
• Don’t overextend yourself.
• No matter how busy you are, take a moment to enjoy your students.