Three Assessment Butterflies Winston Churchill once said ‘success is stumbling from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.’ Looking back now on assessment in our first year at Michaela, I can now see what I was blind to then: we stumbled and blundered. What mistakes did we make, and how did we stumble? We spent hours marking. Marking First mistake: we spent exorbitant amounts of time in the first year marking, in particular marking English and History essays and paragraphs. The hidden pitfall of marking is opportunity cost. Data Our second mistake: we spent far too much time in the first few years on data input. What we realised is this: data must serve teachers, rather than teachers serving data. Design Our third mistake was this: we had forgotten about forgetting. Looking back with hindsight, these three mistakes – on marking, data and design – helped us realise our two great blind spots in assessment: workload and memory. We were forgetting just how much our pupils were forgetting. The Battle of the Bridge
The feedback continuum: why reducing feedback helps students learn The effects of feedback are more complex than we often realise. While expertise and mastery is unlikely to develop without feedback it’s certainly not true to say that giving feedback results in expertise and mastery. There are few teachers who do not prioritise giving feedback and yet not all teachers’ feedback is equally effective. My understanding of the effects of feedback has grown as I’ve come to accept and internalise the profound differences between ‘performance’ and ‘learning’. Hattie and Timperley point out that, “Feedback is one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement, but this impact can be either positive or negative.” It’s interesting to consider the view from cognitive psychology. This might seem on first reading to contradict your lived experience. In the past I’ve used the analogy of navigation to explain this. So, does this mean that the only feedback we should give is of the map reading variety? This then is my suggestion for a feedback continuum.
Stopping the Marking Runaway Train… | Mr Rees' Blog For the last six months, like many schools, we have been reviewing our approaches to feedback and marking and this September we’ll be starting term with a revised approach. We hope that this will have a more positive impact on learning whilst reducing the workload of teachers in the school. Having been through this process, here are 10 things that I know or think about marking and feedback in no particular order: Although it is widely talked about that feedback has the biggest effect size on children’s learning, in 38% of cases feedback has shown to have a negative effect on learning (Kluger & Denisi – 1996). ‘If there’s a single principle teachers need to digest about classroom feedback, it’s this: The only thing that matters is what students do with it. Dylan Wiliam How did we get into this mess? I think that there are two key misunderstandings we have made as a profession: ‘Feedback’ has been interpreted to mean ‘marking’. The process of changing marking approaches…
The Holy Grail of Marking – Peter Richardson – Medium Back in 2014 I wrote a piece on why I felt marking was of little value. I believed that the amount of time spent on marking was disproportionate to the impact it gave. I believe this now more than ever, as: If the child can’t read the comment, it’s a waste of timeIf the child can read the comment, but doesn’t understand what it means, it’s a waste of timeIf the child understands what it means but has no clue about how to improve, it’s a waste of timeIf the child understands how to improve but isn’t given time to do so, it’s a waste of timeIt the child is given time to improve, but is focused on the context of the marked piece of work rather than the knowledge, skills or understanding they were learning, it’s a waste of time The problem at the time was I couldn’t see a way forwards that didn’t involve lots of comments aimed at individuals. Marking like this is like trying to squash water. I mention wellbeing here. The holy grail of marking. I then read this and this from Gov.uk.
Verbal feedback: Telling ’em what they need to do | Learning history I’ve been thinking about writing something on marking and verbal feedback for a while but put it off because so many people have covered it well already. Joe Kirby (Joe_Kirby), Jo Facer (@Jo_Facer), Katie Ashford (@Katie_S_Ashford), Jonathan Porter (@JHC_Porter) and Toby French (Mr_Histoire) are just a few of those doing great work on it and most of what I’ve done has been based on what I’ve learned from them. Additionally, after deciding to write this I saw that Mr Thornton (@MrThorntonTeach) has made a marking crib sheet that looks similar to what we’re using but is prettier, so anyone looking for a way to apply a formalised verbal feedback policy should take a look at the impressive resources he’s producing. All that said I’ve decided to go ahead anyway, mostly because some samples of student work I shared on Twitter got some interest and had a few teachers asking how we structure it all. Structuring Verbal Feedback We begin by reading all the work students produce in lessons. Marking
‘Four Quarters Marking’ – A Workload Solution? | chronotope In our new book ‘What Does This Look Like in the Classroom?’ we interviewed Dylan Wiliam on how to implement research on assessment in the classroom. A central problem in the area of assessment in the classroom has been in the way we often confuse marking and feedback. As Dylan Wiliam points out in our discussion, there is an extraordinary amount of energy expended by teachers on marking and often very little to show for it in the way of student benefit. Although feedback is one of the most effective drivers of learning, one of the more surprising findings is that a lot of it actually has a negative effect on student achievement. A set of marked books is traditionally seen as an effective proxy for good teaching but there is a lot of evidence to say that this might not always be the case. Dylan: I once estimated that, if you price teacher’s time appropriately, in England we spend about two and a half billion pounds a year on feedback and it has almost no effect on student achievement. 1.
Esse Quam Videri – A blog about education. Follow me on twitter @HeatherBellaF 10 Marking and Feedback Strategies | @TeacherToolkit What feedback techniques could you use that make students act on feedback? There are a few days left before the end of half-term and feedback and marking will be required before the holidays begin. Why not try some of the following and avoid unnecessary marking in your own time. Recently, I purchased The Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Notetaking by Mike Rohde; sourced to help develop my blogs and tweets into content that is more interesting and engaging for everyone. Take a look at some of my other blogs featuring sketchnotes? Strategies: What feedback techniques could you use that make students think and take action? The following are 10 strategies that may help you embrace marking and feedback and most of all, help your students act on feedback provided. 1. Student work is not given a grade, or score on the work (although the teacher records a grade in their teacher’s mark-book). 2. 3. Only accept a piece of work when it is of a specific quality. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Reducing Teacher Workload By Re-Thinking Marking-The Michaela Files, Part 1 Last week i visited London’s faintly notorious Michaela School. A few days ago I wrote an overview framing the visit in the ‘big picture’ sense. Now I propose to begin sharing a series of posts–the Michaela Files–describing some of the useful things I learned there. As I walked through London’s Michaela School I was struck suddenly by a strong intuition—call it fear maybe–that recalled my days as a teacher in a high performing urban school. So when I glimpsed the artful intentionality of every moment in student’s lives, the impeccable designed and executed systems, I feared that this was also true of Michaela. But happily like many intuitions which we presume are accurate, mine appears to have been in large part unfounded. Ready for it? Teachers at Michaela do not mark student essays and other writing. How could they? This task, as Joe Kirby and Jo Facer described it to me is ‘maximum effort; minimum impact.’ “We seek the opposite,” Joe said, “Maximum impact at minimum effort.”
If I have to write ‘great use of adjectives’ one more time… – mrgouldsiswingingthis Friday. 3pm. Bye you lot, have a nice weekend. Have you remembered your book bag? Got your jumper? Back into classroom. 25 Maths books. 25 English books. Up and down the country, this scene is repeated. So my school questioned it too. So we stopped. HT proposed something new. And we realised, as we dropped down on the rollercoaster track, this was a brilliant idea and we should have done it a long time ago. Marking is now half an A4 page per lesson. A box for More Able, which isn’t necessarily your Greater Depth-elect children as this can change depending on subject and topic within a subject. Finally… the big one. ‘Next steps’. One big general feedback at the start of the next lesson or even during the lesson if you’re live-marking (but that’s a whole other blog) is crucial to making this work. Trusting your staff to implement this is a massive ask and it means braving it in the face of grumbles of ‘but we’ve always done it this way’ and ‘but Ofsted will expect…’. It takes time.
Stop writing feedback comments…..and see what happens! | Meols Cop High School We are constantly trying out new ideas to ease workload and marking/feedback is always one area that my colleagues are keen to swop and share ideas on. I know that others have the same concerns and that our huge blogs of shared practice are by far the most read, borrowed from and commented upon that we have published externally. I’m not going to put links in this post as they are all on our web-site and we are moving on at a rate of knots anyway. Over the Whit holiday I decided that it was time to try to suggest that we made a positive move towards trialling non written feedback. We had played at it with some great ideas already running and we had shared blogs from other schools such as Michaela to look at ideas from elsewhere whilst also setting up a well-being group and trying to reduce workload in key areas such as data collection. Could we gather evidence that we could mark better without relying heavily on written feedback from us? The example below is from a lesson with 8-1.
Marking is a hornet Written marking takes up huge amounts of teachers’ time. If the average teacher marks for just over 5 hours a week, that’s 200 hours of marking a year. In a secondary school of 100 teachers, that’s 20,000 hours of marking. Written marking is non-renewable: it’s a one-off. Each written comment I put in a pupil’s book only impacts once on that one pupil. What else could we do with that 20,000 hours, that would impact more positively on future pupils and other teachers? There are much better ways to share feedback so pupils improve. Feedback is a butterfly Feedback is effective when it is timely (not too late after the task), frequent (not too scarce) and acted on (not ignored). There are many ways of giving feedback without written marking: At Michaela, we are continually working on making our feedback have the highest-impact possible on learning: Our feedback maximises the responsibility pupils take for self-checking, correcting, editing and redrafting their work. Like this: Like Loading...
Written comments: three simple rules (and a fourth) – James Durran Number #1 in an occasional series of short posts on feedback, appearing in no particular order When delivering training on feedback, I don’t tend to spend too much time on written comments: the focus tends to be on oral and whole class feedback, classroom culture, questioning techniques, editing and redrafting, ‘work-shopping’ approaches and so on. If anything, it tends to focus on ways to minimise written ‘marking’. However, many teachers are bound by policies which insist on regular written, prose comments; many are even tied down to formulae such as ‘three stars and a wish’, or ‘WWW, EBI’. So here are some simple ‘rules’ for such written comments, which I have found helpful. Rule 1: Don’t tell the pupil something that they already know. Many laboriously-written comments on pupils’ work can be translated as: You have done what you know you have done. You have used a range of descriptive techniques. You have worked hard on this. You have remembered the main points. You have added details.
What kind of feedback moves students on? Despite careful planning and checks for understanding during the lesson, students’ work will include slips, mistakes and misconceptions. Each student will have adopted different interpretations of the task, misspelled different words and reached a different point in a journey towards excellence. When we come to provide feedback, what will help? Our feedback will reflect the nature of gaps in student learning. An error may reflect one of several underlying causes: “It could be a slip – that is, a careless procedural mistake; or a misconception, some persistent conceptual or procedural confusion (or naive view); or a lack of understanding in the form of a missing bit of conceptual or procedural knowledge, without any persistent misconception. Before deciding how to convey feedback to students, we need to identify what we want them to change. We can clarify our goals by thinking about feedback as targeting different levels of change. 1) Improving the task 3) Improving self-regulation