Formative Assessment is hardly new concept. It’s something we have been hearing about for at least a decade in education, and many of us are trying to implement in our classrooms. However, it’s arguable that this concept isn’t being implemented on a scale that we might expect, considering its high profile and how beneficial it is for learning. So why isn’t formative assessment sweeping our schools by storm? Here’s where I start to be a skeptical teacher - I actually do think we are trying to implement formative assessment. I just don’t think we, as a rule, are doing a very good job of it. If you’re a teacher like me, you’re putting massive amounts of effort into writing quality feedback. You’re trying to state things positively, to give “two stars and a wish” in a manner that celebrates the good points of the student work, and to make suggestions for improvement in a way that is easy to accept and easy to act on. You probably put heart into your feedback, and spend hours doing it. And if you’re like me, you might sometimes be frustrated when it seems like all the timely and quality feedback you’re providing isn’t having the result on student learning that you would have expected. Marianne Stenger (2017) wrote “Maximizing Your Feedback’s Impact”, a practical and useful article that provides answers to why our feedback might not be having the expected effect on learning. “If you want feedback to have maximum impact on learners’ development, then how learners engage with and implement feedback is just as crucial as the quality and the timing of the feedback itself" (Stenger. 2017). This makes so much sense, and it embarrasses me to admit that I had mostly thought of feedback as something I write, not as something students use. It’s a form of communication, and I was only thinking about the speaker - not the listener (or reader, as the case most often is in DL, which I teach). Stenger explains that we need to help our students to become “proactive recipients” of feedback - and my interpretation of this is that we as teachers need to understand the barriers that are getting in the way of students engaging with the feedback, and ensure that our design of the learning environment and experiences encourage and promote quality engagement and implementation of the feedback provided. Stenger lists four tips for improving student engagement with feedback. First, she encourages us to understand the barriers preventing learners from using feedback, which include reasons such as an inability to interpret the language, not knowing strategies to make changes based on the feedback, feeling a lack of agency or that the changes are not achievable, and of course, not having a willingness to engage in the difficult work of implementation. Next she explicitly states that we need to teach students how to use feedback, build opportunities to implement the feedback, and finally to help students see that improvement is actually achievable. Of course there are major benefits to improving student engagement with feedback. The possibilities for this are incredible. It’s all about improving the student experience and enriching learning, and it empowers students to make use of feedback for learning (i.e. the very definition of formative assessment, if you ask me). It also strikes me as a move towards social-justice. Just as we have spoken about the digital divide becoming a “knowledge and skill” divide rather than one of connectivity, this addresses inequalities in the privilege that some students come to our classes possessing (in this case, the academic vocabulary and family support to make sense of edu-speak or assessment language). Improving formative assessment and engagement with feedback is also another way to give students a stake in their learning - another way to provide students with ownership. Students will get so much more out of the quality feedback that teachers are working to provide, and teachers will feel that their hard work is being appreciated and utilized. There are predictable difficulties as well, such as difficulty taking time out of our class time to teach students how to make sense of feedback in the face of having barely have enough time to meet all of the curricular outcomes for a course as it is. The amount of effort teachers will need to put in on top of curriculum and already busy schedules, coupled with the difficulty fitting this in to the current reporting paradigm, could be prohibitive. This article ties really closely to something I’ve been thinking and writing about in my Credo pieces for years (though I didn’t call it my credo years ago), which is that I want my students to be “Proactive Recipients” - to help them develop the ability to gracefully deal with criticism and to implement feedback - both positive and negative - to enrich their learning experience. Stenger lists the fact that receiving feedback can be an emotionally loaded experience for students - it can feel like rejection of them rather than a discussion of their product - and this requires finesse in order to masterfully provide tips and strategies that students can use while not losing face. I’m not there yet, but I definitely think about it a lot. Honestly, I don’t know how to dissociate the emotion from the feedback because it’s something I feel really strongly myself. Interestingly, although I’ve been thinking of this as an important part of my philosophy of education for some time, I have never actually tried to come up with a plan for how to teach it or develop these skills with students in the online environment. I had strategies for in person (rewriting rubrics in kid-friendly language as a group, for example, or asking “what does a _____ look like?” and creating criteria together), but I have really only put effort into what I hope is useful feedback coupled with the explicit ability to rewrite any assignment making use of the feedback I have provided. I overlooked the fact that some students might not want to add to their burden of work by redoing assignments when they can see the list of other ones they need to finish before the end of the course. So here is my big takeaway: IT’S ALL ABOUT DESIGN. Yikes. That means if it isn’t working, it’s my fault, right? Stenger cites Winstone & Nash’s list of SAGE Recipience skills, which is one framework we could use to help students learn how to accept and use feedback.I have identified the elements of design/credo that I need to alter to enable my students to actually use the feedback that I like to THINK is formative. I also need to think about how, in the online environment, I can allow time to IMPLEMENT feedback, which I think means I need to turn away from the “list” of assignments and start using some sort of assessment system that values time on task. But with a huge list of courses that I teach (like, 30. Seriously), the idea of reworking them is OVERWHELMING. But important. But scary. Sigh. Disruptive change, man.
Here are some ideas I came up with that I could use in my online practice to start making change and improving impact of feedback on student learning.
For me, turning my focus away from what I write in the feedback to how the students can interpret and use the feedback is a paradigm shift, and I think it’s probably the largest stumbling block in the race to having formative assessment REALLY implemented in our schools. Ultimately I think learners need to take ownership of their learning if we want them to achieve deep and meaningful outcomes. Giving them the tools to properly engage with their feedback is one way we can empower them to take this ownership. Note: Images created using piktochart.
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Leslie McCurrachEnthusiastic Learner. Avid Gardener. DL Teacher. Archives
March 2018
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