Speaker 1: So we're going to talk today about what is feedback anyway, also the elements of effective feedback, and five simple strategies that you can incorporate in your classroom. So let's start by answering this question, what is feedback anyway? From a book called Advancing Formative Assessment in Every Classroom, A Guide for Instructional Leaders, Connie Moss and Susan Burkhardt define effective feedback as a teacher's response to student work with the intention of further learning. Another quote that I really like came from a book on literacy and learning lessons from a longtime teacher where Reggie Routman stated that effective feedback is not phrase or criticism, it is carefully chosen language and actions that propel the learner forward. And what I think we want to take away is that student feedback is information we provide our students that allow them to take their learning to the next level by improving their conceptual understanding. Research shows that academic feedback is more strongly and consistently related to achievement than any other teaching behavior. I found this really interesting. They said that this relationship is consistent regardless of the grade your students are in, their socioeconomic status, their race, or their school setting. The same study also found that when effective feedback is paired with corrective procedures that most students can attain the same level of achievement as the top 20% of students. So this just proves that the power of effective feedback can have on our students academic success. We're going to start by talking about the elements of effective feedback before we jump into the strategies. So we're going to talk about how effective feedback should be goal referenced, it should be tangible and transparent, it should be actionable, timely, ongoing, user-friendly, and consistent. First thing we're going to talk about is how it should be goal referenced. So effective feedback requires that a person has a goal, takes action to achieve the goal, and then receives goal related information about his or her actions. So the first thing we want to do is we want to establish a goal for our students. But we don't want to stop there. We want to make sure that we're checking in along the way to ensure that they're reaching this goal. And then while we're sitting with those students and discussing their accomplishments towards the goal, we want to give them goal related information that could help them further their learning. The next element of effective feedback is that it's tangible and transparent. So we want to make sure that our feedback, we provide our students with a clear goal and with something that's tangible they can actually work with. A lot of times when we're talking about clarity and making sure our goals are clear, I like to have students repeat the goal to me. So when I tell students the goal, I oftentimes will have them repeat it back to me just to check for understanding and to be sure that they know what I'm expecting of them and that also that they know what they have to do to accomplish that goal. The next element of effective feedback is that it's actionable. So we want to make sure that it's concrete, it's very specific, and that the information we're giving our students is useful to them. And it provides them with something actionable that they can actually do something with. So instead of saying something like you need to fix this sentence, that's very vague and not very clear. We don't leave our learner feeling like there's something that they can do with that information. What we might want to say is this sentence needs to have correct punctuation. And then so we're finding something that needs to be fixed. And then we're going to identify something that they can do with that. So we can give them a reminder by saying remember that every sentence should start with a capital letter and end with a punctuation mark. Something as simple as that gives them some heads up on what they need to do with that goal that we have given them. The next element of effective feedback is that it's timely. And this is probably one of the most important elements of effective feedback. Oftentimes I would, you know, I would give my students a test or an assessment and then I would grade it and then I'd leave notes on that test. But really there's a more effective way to give feedback. We should give feedback when they can still use that information and make attempts to improve upon their work. And then put it into place in that concept or that learning target. After the test, we've already scored them, we've already graded them. So it should be given to them when they have time to actually do something with it and when the effects are still fresh in their mind. The next element of effective feedback is that it's ongoing. So the more feedback students receive in real time, the better that their performance will be. So when we are, when we think about this, it's helpful to think about video games. And I say that because when we make a mistake in a video game, we oftentimes, we pick back up from where we left off. So we learn from the mistakes so we don't do it again. And then we progress to the next level. And this type of feedback is an ongoing process. And it's exactly the type of feedback that we want to give our students. It's also really helpful that we're doing continuous check-ins along the way. The next element of effective feedback is that it's user-friendly. So when we say user-friendly, we're talking about being student-friendly. So we want to make sure that what we're telling our students is different student by student. So even if feedback is specific and accurate, it is not of much value if the user cannot understand it or is overwhelmed by it. So this is where we talk about differentiation and making sure that we're developing goals that meet individual learners. Since every student is different and they all have different learning abilities and needs, we need to make sure we're giving feedback on that individual basis. One issue that we have as teachers, and we also probably relate to this, is that it's time constraints. So oftentimes when I was setting these goals with my students, it's so powerful to make sure that you're reaching your students in a one-on-one conference at least once a week. And again, time was always an issue. But one thing that I would do when I was setting these goals with students is to carry around a timer. And it wasn't a timer that made noise. It was just a light-up timer. So it was just a signal for me. I would put five minutes on that timer. And that just allowed me to give every student in my class at some point during the week five minutes of my time to really focus in on what they needed as a learner and how I could help them as their teacher. So this really helped with keeping with, you know, when you have nearly 30 students and some of you guys in middle and high school, you have even more than that. So by allowing yourself a certain set amount of time each week and making sure you stick to that time, that really helped me make sure I reached all my students during the week. And then the final element of effective feedback is that it's consistent. So I love this quote, success doesn't come from what you do occasionally, it comes from what you do consistently. And I think consistency is so very important. This means setting high standards for achievements and holding our students accountable for that. Rubrics immediately come to mind for me. These are hugely helpful in making sure that student work is consistent and of the high standards that you've set forth. One great thing about rubrics is that it provides a great opportunity for performance based feedback. Where instead of focusing on the student, you're really focusing on the work they're doing and their performance along the way. The added bonus of rubrics is that they also provide opportunities for independent learning. So if you give them the rubric at the start of a project or a lesson, then they can kind of self-initiate themselves along the way to make progress towards achieving the end goal. Rubrics are also great because one thing that I would often do is I would have students have the rubric in hand as they were completing tasks. As they were completing tasks, they would highlight once they completed that, whatever it was on that rubric in that area. Once they highlighted, I could then check their work and then I would also carry around a different colored highlighter. And I would highlight where I saw, where I felt they fell on that rubric. And then what that allowed for was, it allowed for me to give feedback to my student in a way that let them know, here's what, here's where your thinking lies, but here's where my thinking lies. And then we could kind of meet in the middle to decide how much further they had to push their work and how they could achieve that goal. So rubrics are really great for consistency. So now that we've went through those elements and I'll quickly review them. Goal reference, tangible and transparent, actionable, timely, ongoing, user-friendly, and consistent. I'd like to know which of these elements of effective feedback do you find most challenging. So there's gonna be a poll that comes up if you could just answer that poll. And then in the chat feature, if you could just tell us how you address these challenges. We'll take a minute or two to do that right now. Okay, so it looks like goal reference, that's a challenge. I would agree with that. Sometimes we, as when we're looking at goals, it's hard to just, it's hard to find one thing. We want to, we want to kind of, you know, find all the things that we think they could really improve upon. One thing I used to do to help with that is just find one. And it was difficult sometimes, but finding one goal really does help hunker down just on that individual goal. Yeah, timely, that is, that is an ongoing teacher issue, isn't it? I wish I had the answer. But there's, there are a lot of things that help. The timer really helps me. And I think just in being, in holding, kind of holding ourselves accountable, even though we could spend 10 or 15 minutes with all our students, we'd love to do that. It's just time just sometimes doesn't allow for that. We'll jump in now to the strategies for effective feedback. So we're going to go through five today. The first one is the multiple media strategy. The second is the feedback sandwich. The third are post-its. The fourth is the quick and quiet strategy. And then the fifth one is the PEN or PEN strategy. So we're going to talk about all these today. We're going to start though with the multiple media strategies. So there are so many different apps and programs out there for teachers today to use with our students. And I've listed three here, but there are hundreds out there. Flipgrid and Seesaw are great, are great apps for student portfolios. There's a lot of reasons that these are great. Seesaw tends to be for lower L. Flipgrid goes across the grade levels quite well. But what they both do is they, as it relates to effective feedback, is that they allow for our students to pose it, or a teacher to pose a question. And then students are given a certain amount of time to respond. So you can set that time limit. So you can say you have on, you have 90 seconds to respond. And then they have to respond through video. So an actual recording of them talking. Or they can also, there's some features that allow them to type in answers. But this is really helpful in giving feedback because once they, once they record that, and it all comes up on one big screen, and then you as the teacher can go back through and provide feedback either to the individual students, or to a group of students, or to the whole class. The time feature on these is great too. Because let's say you're doing a science investigation and you want your student to say the claim evidence and reason, in reasoning. And this is a really quick way to grade that. If they can just take 90 seconds to record them saying that, it gives, it gives you a chance to actually go through and grade it. And maybe offer some feedback towards that claim evidence and reasoning without having to read, you know, 30 on science investigation. So this is a, it's a great time-saving feature. And it's also just a really good overall feature that both of those apps allow for. The third one there are Google Docs. I love Google Docs. I use them all, use them all the time. One thing that, one useful way to use them in the classroom is just have your students do a lot of their assignments and their work there. As far as feedback goes, the wonderful thing about Google Docs, and several you may know, is that you can actually comment or, or make a suggestion within your students work. And it'll show up on the right-hand side. And so it's, and you can actually highlight where you want them to make fixes or revisions. And as they open up that Google Docs, they'll see that you've made those comments and revisions. And what they can do is they can make those fixes and then they can check the problem off as resolved. Another reason I like platforms like Google Docs is because kids love, you know, a lot of times we take our work home at night. And kids always love like checking in on there and seeing like you were up at 7 o'clock or you're up at 9 o'clock at night. And you were, you were thinking of them. You were working through their work. And so there's lots of reasons why, why, why all three of these are great. Those are just a few of the reasons. Another one that's not up here is ClassDojo. They have a new feature that allows you to put your student portfolios right up on, they allow for student portfolios. And you could, you as a teacher can go ahead and comment on their work or whatever they posted. Parents can also log in and see their students progress and see those notes that you've left for your student as well. So that's on ClassDojo. That's another great resource. The next strategy that we're going to talk about is the feedback sandwich. Now many of us have, are probably familiar with this. But what we do here is it's where we leave, we say positive feedback. And then we, then we, the second thing we do is we provide some sort of constructive feedback. What is it that we want our students to accomplish? And then we close out that conversation with another form of positive feedback. So an example might be if a student is creating a writing piece and they're, maybe it doesn't have a clear direction, you might say and starting with that positive feedback, the title and the opening paragraph of this essay are strong. It's engaging and intriguing. You did a great job of hooking your reader right away. So you've given them that comment, that feel-good moment. And then now we're going to give them some sort of constructive feedback. What is it that we want them to do? So we could say, however, the reader may get a little lost to their train of thought on this argument. So in the organization of this essay could be something to work on when you're revising. Now we've given them something specific that they can work on. And then we're going to end again with another form of positive feedback. So we might say overall your passion for your stance that you argue in this essay is sure to make a great impact on every reader. That way we've just affirmed them again. But we've also, most importantly, we've given them something to work with. The third strategy that we use, and this is probably my favorite, is the posted strategy. So I would use this oftentimes in math and in writing and reading. Any of you who are familiar with Lucy Calkins, she oftentimes talks about not writing directly on student work. And we all have our different beliefs on that. But this kind of, this posted strategy works to help with not writing on students work. It actually, you write on the post-it note what it is you want your student to accomplish. How I would use them is I would put a date at the top of the post-it when I was sitting down with my student for their conference. I would put that today's date. And then I would write something that I would like to see them improve upon. So maybe I want to make, maybe they should make their thesis stronger. Or maybe I want to see multiple steps worked through on paper for their math, within their math. Whatever it was, I would write it down on the post-it note. And then I would put a date below that at the very bottom of the post-it note, and when I would like that to be accomplished. This allowed for a lot of ownership over students' learning, because we've established a goal that we want them to reach. And then we've given them a date that we needed, that I required it to be done by. Students love this for a lot of reasons, but it's actually like a little artifact that they had of the time that, you know, that we worked closely together. But what it also allowed for was for them to see exactly what it was that I wanted them to, to kind of figure out. When they accomplished that in their work, oh and I would place that post-it note right in, right in where that, where I wanted that revision to be made. And then when they accomplished that goal, they would actually write the date next to the, next to my revision date. And they would move it to the back of their notebook. This was great for a lot of reasons. Kids always loved like looking back at their work. It gives them kind of a running record of everything that we worked on together. And it also, it gives them a sense of accomplishment. Because when they, when you can look at the back of your notebook and see how many, how many things you worked on through your piece, there's definitely a lot of student ownership that comes into play there. So that was, that's a great technique for any subject area. The fourth strategy is the quick and quiet strategy. And the reason I like this one is because this is, this is one where you do it to your whole class. So you're not just picking out a couple of students. You're actually doing it really quickly and quietly when students are working at their desks. And these generally, when we say quick, we're talking like a minute or two max. But it's just, and it's very inquiry-based. So you as a teacher are going and you're asking them, you're asking them to tell you about something that they worked on. So it could be as easy as tell me, tell me what you're doing today. Or maybe you find something specifically and you're like, what do you mean by this that I see here in your writing? Whatever it is, it's really quick and quiet. What you, what you're trying to do is you're trying to get your student just to talk about, just to hear their take on where they're at in their work. And to, and to figure out if there's any, in that short amount of time that you're with them, is there something you can do quickly to kind of help them move to the next level or take their work to the, to one, you know, it's the next step. So this technique, again, the intention of it just to go through your class really quickly and you're not just picking out a few students. You're just kind of check, trying to check in with, with all of them. Again, time comes, it does play an issue and that's why you want to just be really quick and quiet about it. As students are, you know, at any time students are working silently at their desk. And then the last, last strategy we have is the PEN or PEN strategy. So this is where we first start by positively identifying a strength. And then the second thing we do is we're very explicit. So be explicit in what it is you want your student to do. And then the third thing we do is we identify next steps. So it's kind of similar in a sense to the feedback sandwich, but, but it allows for, there's a point where it allows for us to be a little bit, to go a little bit deeper. Because we're being explicit and we're going to then identify next steps for the student to take. So one way you might want to use is, let's say you're just doing equivalent fractions. And so in fourth grade, that's the grade level I taught, this is, this is very common. So when you're doing equivalent fractions, let's say a student, you see a certain student struggling with, with it. You want to go over there and just positively identify a strength. So something that I would maybe notice is that I would say to that student, I recognize how you were able to identify that one-half is equal to two-fourths. So I'm just identifying something that I noticed they did really, they did well. So they're kind of grasping the concept. Maybe their struggle comes in with other fractions that aren't as easy to identify equivalent fractions for. So I'm going to be explicit when I say, I notice that it is challenging for you to identify a fraction that is equivalent to one-third. So maybe that's where they're struggling. And then I'm going to give them some next steps. So what can I, what can they do to figure it out? How do they figure out if it's not one-half or two-fourths, it's something a little trickier. How can they figure out an equivalent fraction for that? So I'm going to identify their next steps. And so what, I'm just going to give them the strategy. Maybe it's a strategy that I taught whole group, but they just need to hear it again. And this is another time where it's important after I've told them the next steps, I want to see them try it out. So maybe I say to them, I remind them that they can multiply the numerator and the denominator by the same number and they'll get an equivalent fraction. And so what I want, what I might do is ask them to repeat that to me. So repeat that step or strategy to me. And then I'll have them try it out right in front of me. So just to ensure student understanding, I just want to, I just want to be sure that they really understand what to do with that information that I gave them. So again, that's called the PEN strategy. Positively identify a strength, be explicit, and then identify next steps. We are through those, those elements of effective feedback and the five strategies. So let's now just take a moment to talk about what strategies you will use in your classroom. And you guys can do that through the form of the poll that's coming right up. And then also in the chat feature, if you have any other feedback strategies that others could find helpful, I always love seeing the feedback you guys give. So if you could just take a moment to tell us about some of the feedback strategies that you use in your classroom, that would be great too in the chat feature. Yes, Christy, I love Class Dojo too. That's a great one for that. Yes, Exit Tickets. That's another one I forgot to mention. Those are really great to check for understanding. Awesome ideas. So thanks for taking some time out of your busy days to spend time with us here. I hope you were able to take something away from today's webinar. Thank you guys. ♪♪♪