Effective Feedback

Dear my team bear class,

This is exciting, practical and powerful.

Talking about assessments, I remember the piles of tests I had to mark when I began teaching you. While I thoroughly enjoyed coding your assessment piece overall, what I enjoyed the most was the feedback I have given to each of you. What I am about the share with you is going to help me to be a better teacher for you. More particularly, it will help me give you a more effective feedback to better your understanding on how to improve and stretch you knowledge.

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Reading & Take-away's:

• Leahy, S., Lyon, C., Thompson, M., & William, D. (2005). Classroom assessment: Minute by minute, day by day. Educational Leadership, 63(3), 18-24

• Chappuis, J. (2012). “How am I doing? ”Educational Leadership, 70, 36-40.

"Students need a clear vision of the intended learning." (Lehy et al.)

At the beginning of each lesson, I should make clear to you what our Learning Intentions are by explicitly presenting it on the board. We can then discuss as a class what those learning intentions mean to that particular lesson. I am also thinking that it would be effective if I were to return to these learning intentions at the end of the lesson so that we can reflect on it too. I'll try to make up activities so that this reflective piece is fun and engaging.

"Our instructions activities need to align directly with the intended learning, and students need to see the connection between the learning and what they are doing." (Lehy et al.)

I can see that this quote directly connects to the backward design I have explored earlier this semester. Backward design allows me, as your educator, to make sure all that we do in a classroom is connected to the learning objectives. However, do you sometimes wonder how what you are doing is of any relevance to your learning? Blame me. I certainly am at partial fault for designing an activity where you might be lost in such a way. What this means is that I need to (i) be more reflective on the activities I plan to see if it truly gets at the heart of our learning objectives, (ii) implement more scaffolds to allow you to make deeper connections between our learning objectives and the activities, (iii) and to be more explicit to explain why we do what we do during our classroom activities. It is my intention to be transparent with you what we are doing in class. My hope for you is for you to know what is going around you and see how you're growing as a learner through the activities we do in class.

"Assignments and assessments need to be set up so that students can interpret the results as indicators of what they have or have not learned." (Lehy et al.)

The quote says "indicators of what they have or have not learned", but I would like to make a small modification by saying "what they have yet to acquire and refine". BC Curriculum is based on the core-competency skills to help you be equipped with adaptive expertise and be a life-learn learners with those skill sets. As your educator, it is certainly important that you know the necessary content to help you understand the world around you. However, it is far more important that you know how to engage with those information with a critical lens. Ultimately, I want you to be able properly use the information around you to be able to draw logical conclusions, and make well-discerned decisions to help you achieve your goals in life. So, my assignments and assessments will have indicators to help you understand what you can do to refine those essential skills. My plan is to provide you with a written feedback or a highlighted rubric that explicitly outlines what you can do to further your competency skills. We can also have check-in appointments throughout the subject class to see how you're feeling about the progression of the units, and what you can to do to grow in your proficiency.

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LITTLE NOTE TO SELF:

Feedback can come in the following ways:

• Ongoing feedback through conversations and sticky notes

• Peer feedback

• Self-assessment / self feedback

• Summative feedback

Be sure that feedback is positively framed, tangible and points to the next step,