Читать книгу The Handbook for Poor Students, Rich Teaching - Eric Jensen - Страница 14

CHAPTER 5

GIVE FABULOUS FEEDBACK

The topic of this chapter may be the holy grail of generating real student motivation and stronger effort. Here, you get tools to generate better quality feedback. As soon as you and I see progress, we get inspired. With feedback, the goal moves closer, and hope rises. That’s how it works for your students too. Think about the nature of the feedback you give your students, and take a moment to answer the survey questions in figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1: Consider how you approach assessment and feedback.

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Your students need and want quality, ongoing feedback to help them learn. Engage the mindset that great feedback is the breakfast of champions. Making sure that all your students get the feedback they need to grow from their mistakes can feel overwhelming, but it’s an essential part of your teaching toolkit. When you intervene with students by giving them constructive feedback on their learning, you can expect a strong 0.65 effect size (Hattie, 2009), meaning more than one year’s worth of academic gains. Give more positives than negatives (3:1 ratio) and be specific enough to focus on key things students can change.

We start this chapter with a look at the value of providing students with ongoing formative assessment and then details four specific forms of feedback: (1) qualitative feedback, (2) quantitative feedback, (3) micro–index card (MIC) feedback, and (4) student feedback. Unfortunately, these types are often those teachers least use. But you can change that path.

Ongoing Formative Assessment

The term formative assessment means you are using the evidence of learning (or lack of it) to adjust instruction toward a goal during the process, not just at the end. (See figure 5.2 for the feedback loop.) Formative feedback measures progress over the long haul. Formative evaluation for both students and teachers has a very high effect size of 0.90 (Hattie, 2009). This factor is effective across many variables, including student ages, duration, frequency, and special needs. Researchers conclude in one meta-study that regular use of classroom formative assessment raises student achievement by a substantial level—from at least 0.40 to 0.70 standard deviations (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Wiliam, 2018).

Figure 5.2: Feedback loop.

One of the dangers of teaching without ongoing formative assessment is that you might go a week or two and still be unsure if your students are really getting it. But if you set up your class for daily multiple checks for understanding, you’ll learn fast and adjust fast too. Higher-performing teachers notice quickly what is not working and adjust rapidly, revise, and redo a lesson.

No matter what kind of feedback you use in your class, quality formative assessment needs the following five benchmarks to work well: (1) clear, shared goals; (2) progress; (3) actionable feedback that moves learning forward; (4) students as owners of their own learning; and (5) tracking. Use the checklist in figure 5.3 to gauge the effectiveness of the formative assessments you use with your students.

Figure 5.3: Assess your formative assessments.

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When your assessments reflect all of these feedback benchmarks, it leads to far more effective strategies than saying “Nice work” or “Good job.” Using this checklist to evaluate and improve all of your formative assessments might be the single best way to boost achievement. Also, easy-to-use classroom activities can serve as powerful formative assessments. Here are my three favorites from Robert J. Marzano’s (1998) A Theory-Based Meta-Analysis of Research on Instruction.

1. Relevant recall questions (average effect size of 0.93): Before you begin a unit, find out what students know and don’t know. Use a brief quiz packed with questions designed to bring out useful and essential prior learning into the foundation time. Consider just ten questions, and have students correct their neighbor’s paper and turn it in. See figure 5.4 (page 56). This gives you a better idea of where to start a unit.

2. “I Decide, You Decide” (average effect size of 0.89): Students in pairs alternate deciding and sorting information. Students have the content information on cards, papers, or digital media. You call out the decision to make, and the two students work out the answer. For example in science, you might say, “Compare and contrast oxygen and helium.” The students can create a Venn diagram showing the overlap between the two elements, do a mind map, or just make two columns. Then, they share it with the class and get feedback.

3. Graphic organizers and mind maps (average effect size of 1.24): Show students an example first and then a blank framework. Figure 5.5 (page 56) highlights one such example, and you can find many others online (visit http://imindmap.com). Sell them on why this is a great way to learn (“It is just like your brain works—it goes from idea to idea to details, then it connects them”). Your students create their own personalized representation of what they are learning and then add illustrations, pictures, or emoticons. Once they are done, they trade organizers with a partner for peer-editing feedback. Then, ask them to turn in their organizers and recreate it from memory. The version they turned in to you can be for their final feedback.

Figure 5.4: Plan a quiz with feedback options.

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Figure 5.5: A student mind map.

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This chapter has four more high-performing feedback strategies that draw on the five benchmarks.

SEA for Qualitative Feedback

Students have no control over their DNA, their parents, or their neighborhood. However, students do have a huge amount of influence over the choices they make (strategy), how hard they work (effort), and the mindset (attitude) they bring to learning. The SEA strategy is a way to reinforce these in the classroom and ask, “How am I doing?”

You will find that although SEA is specific, the real reason it is effective is that you don’t want to have to think in the moment, “How can I give specific feedback?” It has to become automatic and fast. SEA does this by giving you three quick ideas you can use without having to rack your brain. Each of the SEA qualities is a clear and potent replacement for using delayed tests (effect size of 0.31; Hattie, 2009) or saying “Well done” or “Good job” (effect size of 0.09; Kluger & DeNisi, 1996). Instead, using SEA, teachers give specific feedback in regard to strategy, effort, and attitude. Figure 5.6 offers a format to give students effective SEA assessment by simply attaching a quick note to the work you return to students. You could also give these blank forms to students for them to self-assess.

Figure 5.6: Use SEA feedback.

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For example, you could offer the following feedback for strategy, effort, and attitude.

• Strategy: “I loved how you kept trying so many strategies on the third problem until you got it.”

• Effort: “I like that you refused to give up. That extra effort will help you succeed again and reach your goal of mastering this content.”

• Attitude: “Before you began, you thought you could succeed. Your positive attitude showed that you had a growth mindset and helped you come through.”

Use the SEA feedback to build drive and long-term effort by changing who, when, and how often you give feedback. The who means you should never be the only source of student feedback. The majority should come from the student him- or herself, peers, computers, the physical results of actions, a rubric, or a standard set as a model or a checklist. The when means that sooner is better than later. The how often might be the most important question of all. Because feedback’s contribution to motivation, learning, and achievement is so high, ensure that your students get some kind of feedback (by their peers, the activity itself, reflection, or you) at least once every thirty minutes, every school day of the year. By using specific high-scoring, self-awareness feedback strategies with an effect size of a huge 0.74, you give students the gift of affirmation and light a fire (Marzano, 1998).

3M for Quantitative Feedback

The 3M (milestone, mission, and method) feedback process focuses on orienting students to learning in an empirical way. The beauty of it is its simplicity. This feedback answers the three most essential questions students have about how they are doing: (1) “Where am I?” (milestone), (2) “Where am I going?” (mission), and (3) “How do I get there?” (method). The effect size is a whopping 1.13, which tells you it is highly effective (Wiliam & Thompson, 2007).

The 3M process involves using feedback with students and training them to use the process, which includes three steps: (1) teach students the 3M process, (2) ask students to track their progress, and (3) guide students to improvement. Let’s look deeper at each of these.

Teach Students the 3M Process

Before students can use the 3M process on their own, you need to first teach them its critical pieces. Give them a filled-out 3M notecard like the one in figure 5.7. Later, I will show you a version you can give students to set and track their progress over time.

Figure 5.7: Introduce students to 3M feedback.

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Once you begin to use the 3M process with students, they will see its value. Over time, students will learn to self-assess.

Ask Students to Track Their Progress

For students to self-assess, they need data to track how they are doing. The data are simply their scores, which can come from self-assessments, a returned assignment, a student-graded quiz, or any other form of written, numerical score. So, quality data could be as simple as sixteen out of twenty points on a quiz. Provide them with a tracking sheet to track all scores for a unit and for any score less than 100 percent, instruct them to write notes about what they must do to improve. See figure 5.8.

Figure 5.8: Track progress.

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When tracking their data, students should be aware of their mission during this step. The mission is always simple; it is 100 percent. You may have students with special needs who start at a much lower score than the rest of the class. In their case, the mission focus is on 100 percent improvement (from three correct to six correct is a 100 percent improvement). These high expectations are a critical part of the achievement mindset. Keep them high, and focus on the micro goals (the method) necessary to make them happen. (If you need a refresher on goal setting and micro goals, refer to chapter 4, page 48.)

Guide Students to Improvement

A key benefit of the 3M strategy is developing student autonomy. They will quickly figure out their milestone and mission but often need help with their method—how to improve their learning. Post a list of “How I Can Get Better at Learning” tips on the classroom wall to encourage students to try various ways of learning and to figure out, on their own, how they learn best. See figure 5.9 (page 60). You can make your own developmentally appropriate list of student-learning tools.

You can also have students draw the list and post it. Imagine the powerful effects when students can take their milestone data (like “Eight of fifteen words correct”), reaffirm their mission (“100 percent on my next vocabulary test”), and decide for themselves how to improve their learning (“Maybe I should ask more questions in class”). See figure 5.10 (pages 60–61) for a goal tracker students can use to set their milestone, mission, and method.

Students can keep their goal tracker in a folder or digital file, or teachers can post them on the wall as ongoing student work. I love empowering students to know and be able to act on the results of their own learning. They’ll know their milestones and their goal (mission), and they’ll choose their next step to get better (method). Finally, it’s most effective when classrooms use the 3M process at least once or twice a week. Use the four-week planning sheet in figure 5.11 (page 61) to help you do this. To empower your students to become better learners, help them learn the tools to do the work, then connect the dots for them. Students learning to regulate their own growth is the heart of the 3M feedback system.

Figure 5.9: Poster of student-learning tools.

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Figure 5.10: 3M feedback tracker.

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Figure 5.11: 3M planning sheet.

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MIC Feedback

MIC is an acronym for micro–index card feedback. It is a fast way to help students get unstuck and move ahead. In many classes, students with less confidence dread taking on challenges, creating, producing, completing, writing papers, or doing projects. One issue they have is starting off on the wrong foot and never quite catching up. MIC feedback deals with that issue. It is a way to get inside a student’s head to discover his or her thinking paths (and stuck areas) that might hurt his or her chances for success.

As you start the year (or semester), gathering MIC feedback is simple. Ask students to write their name on the back of an index card. On the other side, ask students to write on one specific topic. This portion of the card will look something like figure 5.12 (page 62).

The prompts that could appear here are infinite, but consider using one of the following.

• Two things about themselves that you (the teacher) should know but most don’t know

• Past experience in the subject area (in five sentences or less)

• How the week has been (what they liked and what they’d change)

• Goals for the class

• About parts of a paper (introduction, theme, thesis, evidence and support, argument rebuttals, summary, and conclusions)

• Three friends in the classroom (to learn how much social glue each student has)

• A five- to ten-word outline of what they are currently working on

• Advice for another younger student about how to approach most mathematics problems

Figure 5.12: Notecard for MIC feedback.

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For the first two weeks, ask for students to do one of these activities every other day. Read and sort these cards. You will quickly identify which students need which types of differentiation.

With this method, you can learn about specific topics that you would never have time to ask for individually. Over time, students realize they can get help from you (privately, if needed). Initially, this seems like more work. But quickly, students (and you) get the early information correct, and they can move forward in larger chunks faster.

On the social side, you can use the class time to have students work with just the right partner or in a small group to talk about what they put on their card and what they will do next. (Review chapter 2, page 21, for some groupwork strategies.) With peer support, students’ assignments and projects will fit basic proficiency requirements and then you can focus on moving to mastery levels. Each time you use this process, the students will get just a bit better at using the MIC strategy. See figure 5.13.

Figure 5.13: Track MIC feedback responses.

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Student Feedback

Perhaps surprisingly, the all-time best feedback is student feedback to you, the teacher (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). Getting feedback from students is simple. Consider the following four student feedback strategies and use figure 5.14 to record which forms you use, record key points on the feedback you receive, and reflect on how you will use that information.

Figure 5.14: Student feedback tracking sheet.

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1. Nonverbal information: Observe students during seatwork time. Look for signs of physical or emotional distress during the task so you can stop and ask what your students are experiencing (“Can I check in with you for a moment?”). When you introduce something to your class, watch the body language. If any students roll their eyes and slump back in their seats, that’s feedback to you. Your hook or buy-in did not work (or it was missing from your lesson). If everyone except a couple of students is hooked, let each student get started, then go check on the isolated, concerned, or checked-out students. Marzano describes this use of real-time information as withitness, which has a massive effect size of 1.42 (Marzano et al., 2001; Marzano, 2017).

2. Yesterday’s learning: Retrieval practice has a positive impact on learning (Ritchie, Della Sala, & McIntosh, 2013). To find students who are lost, use an activity to get feedback from the previous day’s class. Give students a blank sheet of paper and twelve minutes to write down everything they can recall from yesterday’s lesson. Collect their work, and quickly sort it to identify the struggling students. Then, reteach confusing concepts and correct your own teaching mistakes. This way, the students get better and so do you.

3. One-minute summary: At the end of class (as an exit pass), ask students to write an anonymous one-to-two-minute note on two topics. First, they answer, “What is the most important thing from class today?” Then, your students answer, “What is still a bit confusing to you about today’s class?” Even though they’re anonymous, which helps students be honest, they’ll give you immediate, useful feedback on your teaching. Figure 5.15 shows an example notecard with this kind of feedback.