In my early days of teaching I would spend hurs providing students with written feedback that assessed their current performance as judged through a piece of work they had submitted. At the time I thought I was being very helpful and somehow the students would be inspired to do better next time but I soon found that they focused on the grade and they were not interested in the “amazing” notes I had typed up for them. I came to the realisation that I was basically providing a justification for the grade I had awarded for the work and the “feedback” sheet was barely looked at again. If and when I provided time to reflect back on these sheets the majority of students had either lost them or hadn’t given them any more thought since they had been provided to them. Most of us do not have a choice as to whether we can use grades or not and the debate continues as to whether we should have them or not. Alfie Kohn, along with others, have outlined the danger of grades. His article is well worth a read http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/. During my career, however, I didn’t have a choice so I needed to find a way to ensure that students were improving and they were engaged in their learning.

Fortunately, with experience and learning I discovered the need to empower students and involve them in their learning, ensuring that they developed an understanding of the learning process. My recent post outlined how learning intentions and success criteria can make the learning transparent for students. Combining these with explicit, focussed feedback and feed forward discussions provided me with the opportunity to focus on having a developmental impact on student learning and took the focus away from the grade. My assessment approach changed so that the feedback focussed on a discussion related to the learning intentions and success criteria and I found that this way students maintained their motivation and were willing to re-draft their work and feed forward discussions helped students make informed changes to their future learning and allowed them to set individualised learning goals. I have provided a link to Shirley Clarke discussing, “Self, Peer, Teacher” feedback and also Ron Berger’s “Critique and feedback – the story of Austin’s butterfly”. Berger’s video also promotes the idea of the first piece of work not being the final one and clearly shows how “feedback” or “feed forward” can be so successful.

https://youtu.be/DGNp0AJte_c

https://youtu.be/hqh1MRWZjms

The aim in any classroom should be to have students actively involved in learning. This is not an easy task because the needs and learning styles are so different for every student in the class.

A good teacher will ensure that all students participate in class and will use a variety of strategies to ensure this occurs. This may involve the use of music. I have, unfortunately seen teachers use music as a pacifier (students listening to music using headphones), claiming that the students are engaged in their learning because they are quiet and doing their work. There is a whole lot of research that indicates that, in fact, students will have difficulty learning this way, however that is another debate.

It is crucial to “know” your students; know how they learn, know about them; know their strengths, their weaknesses, know their needs and know their interests. Tapping into the interests of students is a great way to get to know students and to help them understand their own world as well as the world of others. Music can work well in doing this. Content and product, however, should not be the major focus. Sound pedagogical practices need to be applied no matter what the vehicle for learning. Shirley Clarke’s work based around learning intentions and success criteria is a sound basis for making the learning transparent for students and takes the focus off content and product onto learning. Hattie and Timperley (2007) describe three questions that should guide learning for students:

• Where am I going? (Learning Intention)
• How am I going? (Success Criteria)
• Where to next? (Feedback)

Learning intentions takes the focus away from what the student is doing to what the student is learning and success criteria assists students in knowing whether they have been successful or not and helps them plan for the future.

Taking this research into account I created some differentiated workshops for Year 7-8 English students to improve their “listening” skills. Students were placed into groups of 8-10 based on their learning need. I developed the following learning intentions and success criteria.

Learning intention:

I will understand:

• the importance of listening skills
• there are different levels of listening.
• how language is used for different audiences and purposes.

Success criteria

 I will be able to:

• make a judgment
• identify and explain issues
• respond by asking questions and/or taking notes
• remember key ideas
• hear and identify key words
• pay attention
• prepare myself for listening

Music was the vehicle for this learning. I specifically selected the first songs and these were by Archie Roach, an Aboriginal Australian singer and song writer because his music related to other texts being studied in the school and covered one of the curriculum priority areas. The learning intentions and success criteria were discussed prior to any activity. The activities, depending on the group ranged from “preparing to listen”, to counting specific words in the song, to discussing key ideas, to students responding by asking questions about the song and ideas contained in it, to taking notes, exploring issues and making judgments about those issues. Once students had been successful in “hearing and identifying” key ideas we moved onto student-selected music where listening and discussion centered round the ideas and issues.

These activities were successful in a number of ways. Students were engaged and they were active but more importantly they all knew that they were learning and they knew what they had to do in the future to be successful. The added benefit for myself was that I got to know my students even better.

Useful links:

http://www.shirleyclarke-education.org

https://visible-learning.org/john-hattie/

I thought these little clips (Travel in Groups) would be a good introduction before creating a code of cooperation with a new Year 7 cohort of students. It emphasizes the importance of every individual and shows how much more can be achieved if we all work together.

Tanya and Danielle from Prepare2Learn introduced a number of online tools that can be used to make learning visible. One of the tools introduced was Story Bird. This is my first attempt. The books created can be submitted online to gain feedback. There are also many other stories to read and comment on.

Dylan Wiliam talks about formative assessment and the importance of this being constant. If assessment isn’t ongoing, then we are just living in hope that students have learned what has been taught. Instead we should be using the assessment to change and guide the learning and teaching program.

Stephen Heppel talks about the future of education. A clear point he makes is that schools can learn from other schools. That the learning isn’t in Academic papers but from connecting, sharing, and learning with other schools.

Some really exciting things happening at my school in relation to differentiated curriculum. We are using data (on demand, pre-tests and class teachers observations) to set up flexible learning workshops where students will move in and out of literacy activities to gain the skills and knowledge the data indicates they need to develop. This video (Carol-Anne Tomlinson) talks about what needs to occur to bring about differentiation.

Feedback_Shirley Clarke

I’ve created a Glog that summarises Feedback and its link to personalised learning.

Feed Up, Back and Forward

Just re-visiting some of the videos out there on feedback. It is a pity that we put such a focus on competition and grades in education. Dylan Wiliam explains why this is an issue.  The focus has to be on the learning.