I've got to assess and give feedback to the certificate students this week on their ceramics unit. This article was very timely.
Students want to learn and they want feedback that will help them improve, but they also want to know why it matters. When a teacher can connect the feedback to an important future skill, students have a reason to incorporate it and can see the transfer process more clearly.
“In many different countries, some done in the context of formative assessment and sometimes summative assessment, what students want is information they can use and the opportunity to use it.”
This is the difficult thing about differentiated feedback. It will necessarily be different, but kids who struggle should also be held to a high level of thinking, and have their ideas honored, even when they are still working to bring their writing skills up to grade level. When teachers focus only on the elements students are worst at, feedback can be demotivating. For the most part, it’s ideas that drive people to learn, not grammar.
What I'm taking from this article is that the feedback I give on the ceramics should be future focused since there won't be an opportunity for them to go back and redo any of their ceramic work. So what lessons can they take from their successes and failures that will make a difference in the next unit? Make strong connections to that. I need to also remember that their visual diaries are an important part of the process and to focus on the ideas they're communicating and not whether grammar was bad or there wasn't enough writing.
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