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Minutes with Charlie - Eight
By Charlie | February 26, 2008
Three questions confront students in the learning process. In order to succeed in the mission of learning, the students must be able to answer all three. A quality classroom assessment program provides the student with the answer to all three on a regular basis.
The second of the three questions is “Where am I on this learning journey?”
If a student does not know his current position of progress toward reaching a learning target, the difficulty of reaching it is greatly increased. It is quite similar to someone on a journey who knows the destination, but has no idea where they are located relative to their destination. There are more ways to go wrong than there are to go right.
A quality classroom assessment program provides the answer to this question with accuracy and in a timely manner to prevent the student from wasting time going the wrong direction or standing still. It does so by using two essential components or competencies.
The first essential component is that of providing the student with quality descriptive feedback. As a general rule, a teacher skilled (and it is a skill that can be taught and developed) at providing descriptive feedback has students who more quickly and more consistently hit and exceed learning targets.
Descriptive feedback should reflect student strengths and weakness regarding a specific learning target or targets of an assignment. It is most effective when it has a dual focus upon what the student is doing right as well as specifics on what they need to work on next in order to advance toward the target.
Descriptive feedback is not evaluative as in a grade. Neither is it ambiguous such as “good job”. A grade and “good job” type comments do not provide students with the direction they need to improve performance. Good descriptive feedback always provides that direction.
Descriptive feedback should be focused upon a limited number of aspects of the learning target and not address every fault or weakness the student may possess.
The second essential component or competency is teaching the student to self-assess and set goals. Having already provided clear targets and samples of high quality work and having already modeled descriptive feedback, the next step is to teach the student to self-assess against the standard of excellence.
We get considerable improvement when the teacher provides descriptive feedback, but the real bang for the buck comes when the student has learned to self-assess performance against the standard.
When a student can accurately measure progress, set goals for improvement, and plot the next steps in improvement a tremendous degree of motivation and responsibility sets in for the student. At this point again, it is the lowest achieving students who advance the most and the quickest as they learn to self-assess and set personal goals.
As students learn to self-assess they also become much more adept at providing descriptive feedback to peers in a standards/criteria based assessment system.
These two components work hand in hand. The teacher never gets out of the descriptive feedback business. Yet, as the students learn to self-assess against a standard, the teacher’s efforts are essential doubled.
Personal Reflection: Does the feedback I provide students give them direction as to what they need to do to improve? Do my students know how to self-assess with accuracy and set goals?
Topics: Feedback, Minutes with Charlie, Quality Assessment Components |