Week 6 Journal

Think back to your time as a student, as well as your role as a teacher. What does good feedback look like? What effect does it have, on the student? The teacher?

Good feedback jumpstart critical thinking and self-reflection of one's work. Feedback should not provide the answer to the student as the student will just do whatever the feedback that the teacher said. Feedback could direct a student to reevaluate their claim or evidence used in a written response. This feedback can include a link to Quizlet so students can review the concepts for reevaluating their work.  

Feedback in my case also directs students to resources found on google classroom. When I was grading exit tickets on balancing equations, my feedback was "refer to the how-to guide to check all of your answers". I had already provided information on the step-by-step process of how to balance equations and students were expected to refer back to this guide and walk through the process themselves. In my feedback, I didn't direct the students to fox a certain problem but based on grading, they knew how many they had to fix. 

Ideas on Feedback based on the given videos 

• Feedback should be focused on what the student needs to do to improve 
• This is called task-based feedback
• Teachers also need to provide how to go about improvement along with what the student can do to improve 
• Ego building feedback (ex: you did great) can stagnate or lower achievement while task based feedback can improve achievement within a classroom
• Good feedback causes thinking
• Feedback provided should have action steps for students so that the idea of ability is incremental and not fixed is instilled 
• Teaching is about figuring out what doesn't work
• Feedback to teachers is also valuable. Teachers can ask students what they liked in a lesson, what they would have changed, and what would they have included 
• Feedback does not just have to be about academic work, feedback can be given based on students' meeting goals. Students can reflect on where they are with their goals and what steps to take to further improve and meet these set goals. This ties back into task-based feedback where a teacher is giving students space to reflect on their goals. The thinking work is then on the student to evaluate themselves and not the teacher. 

Effective ways to provide feedback

From Brookhart (2008), I learned that when students have goals or learning targets that they're working towards overtime, a teacher should be observing patterns in the student's work so that they can provide relevant feedback to the students. I do this by recording data based on exit tickets with my students so I can see how they're developing with writing and argumentation over time. This helps the teacher provide suggestions that benefit the student and is informed by data. 

Before feedback is given, a teacher must ask themselves " when would a student want to hear feedback?". The answer often while the student is thinking about the work as the students can then apply what they've learned or heard immediately.  

It is also important not to provide too much feedback and "fix everything". Teachers can ask students questions like "What are you noticing about this? Does anything surprise you?" or "Why did you decide to do it this way?". This allows students to share their thought process. In work, I am more concerned with a student's thought process than their final answer. After asking these questions, teachers can give specific feedback based on what the student is doing or misconceptions that arose during the conversation.