Feedback Search Results

Open Your Door: Why We Need to See Each Other Teach

…rooms. On the receiving end, there’s something really satisfying about having a peer notice something you’re doing right. In our work, we rarely get positive feedback on the things we try so hard to perfect. I have definitely never had a student approach me after class and say, “Girl, that anticipatory set was off the hook!” The teachers in my school asked, “Who am I to tell someone else what they’re doing wrong?” And here’s my answer: You are experts. You are experts because you have been there, tried that, had the same struggles. So many people don’t understand what…

Book Review: Hattie’s Visible Learning for Teachers

…tasks that are difficult for them. If it were easy for them, they wouldn’t be on my caseload! Before, students would get frustrated and shut down during a difficult task. Now they realize the struggle is part of the process, and they use problem solving strategies and find motivation in their progress. I use feedback and assessment data to plan my sessions with students. Using the feedback to drive instruction has made planning much easier and faster and the results have been much more effective. I work in a district with a very high poverty rate. It can be easy…

What Teachers Want You To Know: A Note to School Administrators

…a lesson or that he noticed what good writing they were doing. I know coming up with specific feedback is hard. Teachers get this; when we grade a hundred papers we can easily default to rotating between Good job! Excellent!, and Well done! We know how useless these are, and how much more meaningful it would be, how much more ACTIONABLE it would be if we pointed out something specific our students did well. So when we’re doing our best, we give specific feedback. And we need the same from you. Two or three times a year, if you watched…

Four Research-Based Strategies Every Teacher Should be Using

…This prevents students from just repeating the same procedure over and over. “With interleaving, mixing up very similar things provides that challenge where students have to know the difference, choose a strategy, and that then helps their learning.” 4. Feedback-Driven Metacognition “When you study, and you don’t do well,” Bain says, “often it is because you were studying what you already knew. It feels better. It’s like, oh, I’ve got this. And not studying what you don’t know. Feedback-driven metacognition is being able to help students learn how to discriminate between what they know and what they don’t.” Classroom Application:…

A Step-by-Step Plan for Teaching Argumentative Writing

…to correctly cite sources. Once each mini-lesson was done, I would then give students the rest of the period to work independently on their writing. During this time, I would move around the room, helping students solve problems and offering feedback on whatever part of the piece they are working on. I would encourage students to share their work with peers and give feedback at all stages of the writing process. If I wanted to make the unit even more student-centered, I would provide the mini-lessons in written or video format and let students work through them at their own pace,…

Episode 131: How World Language Teaching Has Evolved

…I am designing my lessons so that I’m getting tons of feedback on which parts they’re able to process and understand. And I’m scaffolding for them so that from the very first days, they know enough French to be able to respond to me either nonverbally or with very, very simple words. GONZALEZ: Okay. BLOUWOLFF: And I would say that, you know, really what world language teachers do is we teach communication. The content is super flexible, and I love that. We kind of fly under the radar in terms of state testing and national standards. We could basically talk…

The Power of Centering Student Exemplars

…our classroom community in a way that leverages them as tools for instruction while affirming the students who created them in a substantive, lasting way — which, I’d offer, matters more in our classrooms than ever before. Strategy #1: Looking For and Celebrating Specific Wins One thing that I’m a lot better at now than earlier in my career? Being more creative in how I look for wins to celebrate. With the help of a practice from my colleague Andrea James, I’ve started really leaning into this on our feedback days. Along with sharing collective feedback in terms of strengths…

The Art of Annotation: Teaching Readers To Process Texts

…grasp on what they should be noticing. Gather the class and project student work (in my class, students volunteer to share). Prompt students to compare annotations, note their peers’ insights, and offer feedback. Allow students to “borrow” snippets of each others’ annotations if they wish. This is intentionally a collaborative process that promotes the sharing of insights and ideas. Students can use the template as long as it’s needed. The cycle of discussion and feedback can continue indefinitely. At any point, the annotation look-fors can be edited for specific genres, content areas, or other purposes for reading. Click here to…

Episode 57: Nine Simple Solutions for Common Teaching Problems

…getting them to be good at reflection and self evaluation and finding ways to share feedback that are easy for people to see. So Starr created this document that’s a four-column chart for feedback. And what she does in these columns, and she shows an image in the book of it. In one column she puts “Assignment,” and another “Feedback,” and another “Standards addressed” and another “Strategy,” and then there’s blanks below that. So what happens is the kids now are looking at their work, and they’re sharing their own ideas, they’re saying, “Here’s the assignment, and here’s some feedback,”…