Best Practices – “Show What You Know!”

Feedback

• Goal Referenced: Remind students about the goal and the criteria by which they should self-asses. For example, a teacher might say…
  • As you prepare a table poster to display the findings of your science project, remember that the aim is to interest people in your work as well as to describe the facts you discovered through your experiment. Self-assess your work against those two criteria using these rubrics.
• Tangible & Transparent: results related to the goal. The best feedback is so tangible that anyone who has a goal can learn from it.
  • Are students highly attentive, somewhat attentive, or inattentive to my teaching?
• Actionable: concrete, specific, and useful
  • What specifically should students do more or less of the next time, based on teacher information?
• User-Friendly: tell the performers on an important thing they noticed that, if changed, will likely yield immediate and noticeable improvement. (“I was confused about who was talking in the dialogue you wrote in this paragraph.”)
• Timely: the sooner the feedback is received, the more effective it becomes.
  • Options include: written, oral, video-based, computer-assisted learning, peer review, etc.
• Ongoing: the performer has opportunities, if the results are less than optimal, to reshape the performance to better achieve the goal.
• Consistent: performers can only adjust their performance successfully if the information fed back to them is stable, accurate, and trustworthy. Teachers must look at student work together, becoming more consistent over time and formalizing their judgments in highly descriptive rubrics supported by anchor products and performances.

Definition: A method used for teachers to gather information about how students are doing in an effort to reach a goal. Collecting feedback is the basis for improvement in an attempt to close learning gaps.

Checking for Understanding

• Students demonstrate meta-cognitive reasoning
• Informal (i.e. whiteboards, sticky notes, exit ticket,) with immediate, regular feedback
• Frequent, ongoing
• Timely, deliberate, strategic
• Teacher makes informative and timely adjustments
• Physical proximity
• Provide students with opportunities to reinforce “big ideas” and key concepts
• Students can achieve closure by identifying and synthesizing learning objectives.

Definition: Ongoing and structured formative assessments to ensure that teaching and learning objectives are met while supporting the development of self-regulated learners.