Answering "Am I Doing This Right?" with Tech-Facilitated Feedback

"Am I doing this right?"

"I'm stuck!"

"I don't know how else to make it better."

"I think I have the hang of it?"

These phrases are ones that are muttered on a daily basis in every content and at every grade. Students are learning new material and are trying their best to show mastery, but are often unsure if they are on the right track or are meeting expectations. Unfortunately, these questions typically don't get answered until the end of a unit through some sort of summative assignment in which the student gets a grade, sees their marked errors, and then immediately moves on to the next topic of study instead of using the feedback for growth towards improvement.

You can't blame the teacher though, right? With 30+ students per class and having several class periods in a day, the shear combined class load of 150+ students to grade is overwhelming, not to mention and it's near impossible to hold a meaningful conference with every student within a 45 minute class period. To add, many teachers are already spending several hours after school preparing for the next school day. Is all hope lost? Do we accept that's just how it is? Is there a better way? YES! 

Check out these highly effective ways to maximize use of technology in delivering immediate, personalized feedback to every student. 

Tip #1: Incorporate tools that automate the process of providing immediate feedback. Check out this example from Carla Dalton's AQR (Advanced Quantitative Reasoning) class in which she maximized the 'conditional formatting' function within Google Sheets to efficiently check progress towards mastery. This auto-coloring box allows the student to know immediately if their calculation was right or wrong. Immediate feedback of this nature enables students to self-monitor the need for referring back to notes or self-regulation of knowing when to ask for help. This also is intended to correct misunderstandings as they occur, rather than addressing misunderstandings the next day after a worksheet's worth of doing it wrong and solidifying incorrect thinking.

Another example of this automated immediate feedback is done through the use of Moodle quizzes when set to behave in Adaptive Mode, such as this example from Tiffany Mackerley's Chemistry class. This mode turns a traditional quiz into a series of formative questions that has a "check" button which allows students to immediately see which answers are right or wrong. Based on the immediate feedback, students can adjust their response accordingly; the teacher can additionally have it be set up to lose a certain percentage of points with each incorrect answer to minimize random, blind guesses.

Tip #2: Empower your students have their voices be heard as a welcomed source of feedback. In April Heffley's Art IV class, students gave anonymous, critical feedback to their peers' artwork in order to make improvements on what was considered "final" artwork for the time-being. The anonymity allows students to be honest about their thoughts while the teacher is able to monitor students responses through the Teacher Dashboard. Though it does save the teacher time from not being the sole giver of feedback, but it it also valuable to the student receiving the feedback as this process allows varied opinions and perspectives that might not have been considered. Not to mention, it also targets higher order thinking skills by those giving the feedback considering evaluation is the second highest cognitive level in Bloom's Taxomony. Beyond collecting the feedback, Mrs. Heffley then uses the peer's feedback to hold individual conferences with each student artist as they review the feedback together; during this time, the teacher assumes a partner position, rather than evaluator position, in supporting the students' growth.

Tip #3: Seek new opinions from audiences outside the walls of your classroom.

Opening the virtual-doors to your classroom does not have to mean you are connecting with people literally across the globe or are blindly matching with unknown audiences. Patti Hayes' 10th-12th graders at Steele Accelerated High School partnered up with Sandra Champion's GT 5th graders at Hughes Elementary School to review each other's ePortfolios and provide feedback to one another. Google Slides were used to pair up the students, collect written feedback, and link to a FlipGrid that facilitated introductions and oral feedback. This partnership benefited both audiences as the younger students were able to hear from more experienced students in this area, while the older students had their content viewed from true 'outsiders' which helped pinpoints things to be explained or clarified. For more information on this partnership, stay tuned for a blog post detailing this experience set to publish here on 12/9/19!

While all of these tips require time to be invested on the front end to prepare and set up, changing when and how feedback is given maximizes a student's understanding of the material by shifting mindset to viewing feedback as a tool for growth as opposed to a numerical final evaluation. Also note that giving quality feedback is a skill that is developed over time and you can't assume any student, regardless of age, should automatically 'know' how to give good feedback. When asking students to give each other qualitative feedback, sentence stems help focus thinking. Lastly, because feedback is a skill, the more times you ask students to give feedback, the more developed they will become in this area.

This post highlights examples of the following ISTE standards:

• Students use technology to seek feedback that informs and improves their practice and to demonstrate learning in a variety of ways. (ISTE Student Standard 1c)
• Use technology to design and implement a variety of formative and summative assessments that accommodate learner needs, provide timely feedback to students, and inform instruction (ISTE Teacher Standard 7b)

Why You Shouldn't Be Afraid to Replace a "Tried-and-True Method"

Tired of the same old pen-and-paper, drill-and-kill nature of test corrections, Algebra 2 teacher Mrs. Kubacki at Northwest High School wanted to shake things up and to make math a little more engaging for her high schoolers. Of course, her existing method was working just fine; students were completing the corrections and often showing growth. Still, she wanted to take a risk.

Quiz corrections are a staple task in her classroom because they give her students the opportunity to earn back missed points on tests. Many of her students rely on them as a way to boost their grade, and she relied on them as an important step in assessing her students progress in advance of a test. She wanted to ensure that when she replaced a tried-and-true method she would still end up with meaningful evidence of learning, so she turned to an tool that is rising in popularity: a video discussion platform.

Tools like FlipGrid and Recap are becoming more renown, but with any new tool, it’s how you use it that truly matters. Though a great tool for virtual classroom discussion or Vlogging, Kubacki instead challenged her students to create with it. She wanted to see student-created tutorials, to be shared with the class.

Using Recap, also known as Let’s Recap and Recap That, her students created video tutorials for one another solving the questions they had originally missed on their quiz. Prior to filming, she gave them clear-cut, high expectations: they had to show their work, use and even define academic vocabulary words for their audience, and show their work step-by-step so their peers could better learn from their video. As a class and before they first participated, they created a list of video norms and best practices for their tutorials. (This list included rules like: No filming and walking. Eliminate as much background noise as possible. Rehearse your video before filming...)

It's probably worth mentioning that many students did have reservations at first; a selfie generation who constantly Facetime, SnapChat, and learn from YouTube are afraid to be on camera. Just like many adults, they were nervous to document their learning and share it with an audience. Anticipating this, Kubacki did not force her students to be on camera, but instead gave them a choice. She also artfully paired students up for the task, sure to consider their personalities. And since she knows it’s helpful when a leader takes the first risk, she was sure to create her own video first, modeling the class-created expectations.

On the day students finally created and published their video tutorials in class, their teacher was both mobile and available to help anyone in need -- this is one of the many benefits in giving students tasks of creation; the teacher can move out of the driver’s seat and into the passenger’s seat. In the event a student did get stuck, they were expected to create a "point of confusion video" --to post their problem step-by-step, up to the point of confusion, and to finally ask their peers for help. Because she expected students to comment on each other’s videos (they established norms for this too), students were able to get help on their corrections and were able to get immediate feedback from both their peers and their teacher.

Of course, Mrs. Kubacki could have stayed with her tried-and-true method of pen and paper, but what would her students have missed out on? Would they have felt as challenged? What academic or even personal growth might they have missed out on? By instead asking them to create video tutorials through Recap, she gave students a platform where they could immediately share their personal growth with a community of learners who could also benefit from their hard work. Taking this risk gave a larger purpose to students' time and to an otherwise mundane task such as quiz corrections. Even more, these students were empowered to own and share their learning by creating something that would help others.

*This blog has been corrected to clarify that the assignment, quiz corrections, was designed as a formative assessment tool leading up to a final summative grade.