Posts Tagged: feedback

“I rely on rubrics to help me more efficiently provide feedback on informal writing assignments. Being more efficient allows me to respond to students’ writing quickly. A carefully worded rubric can provide students with essential information about the expectations for and their performance on these informal assignments. Being able to provide general feedback by checking a box on the rubric not only saves me time, but allows me to focus my written comments on aspects of students’ writing that are unique to the individual. In other words, the rubric allows me to save time, but also allows me to provide better feedback. The Rubrics Tool in Blackboard Learn helps me create and distribute rubrics to the students.”

“A ‘bloody’ essay is one that has been graded, and as a result, may have quite a bit of red ink on it.  Red ink can be inserted electronically in several ways, which will be demonstrated in this document, but you must remember that lots of red ink doesn’t necessarily mean that you got a bad grade.  What it does mean is that I have lots to say to the writer (read: constructive comments). …These red comments include praise as well as ideas about improving problem areas, and sometimes even hyperlinks to helpful online resources.”

“Improving our feedback based on an analysis of student outcomes (grades/ assessment) might include an assumption that all learning is already known and knowable by the teacher. This means that grades could be seen as proof that the intended parcel of knowledge was successfully acquired by the student. He/she followed feedback cues appropriately in order to assimilate the intended knowledge correctly, and that activity is reflected by student performances on tests or other metrics. This transmission idea doesn’t translate well to practice-based learning such as writing. It also does not allow for the surprises, the ways that student learning drives teacher learning in an ongoing, recursive process. In making space for recursivity, I wish to approach feedback situations as dialogic discussions, [which] means that the response of students to the feedback must be considered valuable to the extent of possibly re-shaping the original claim by the teacher. To be perceived as valuable, student responses need to be invited. This cannot happen if teachers are seen as the ultimate authorities. How can students see themselves in a dialogue if they view feedback as judgment rather than advice that they might not have to take exactly? Students may ignore feedback, but how often do they openly refute or engage with it? The point being that students might respond to feedback in the same way as any number of other one-way directives which claim to invite their participation, but don’t really mean it. Making ourselves clearer is not the same as making more space for student agency, and agency is required for deep learning to occur.”

“Last semester I began using a screen-capturing software called JING, which allows you to make a short videos (5 minutes) of whatever is on your screen. After having students submit papers electronically, I was then able to create a personalized video that both provided visual representations of areas that needed work (highlighting passages for example, moving paragraphs, etc. ) and my comments in the form of audio track that followed the action of the screen. The students really loved this approach and I was not only able to provide a lot more feedback (I found 5 minutes of speaking to be much more than I could ever write) but it made grading much quicker.”