What? You Mean That Students Should Actually USE the Feedback We Give Them?

My favorite mentor of classroom management use to say, "The only thing in learning with a 100% guarantee is forgetting."  This is pretty bad news for teachers.  Along with that, I learned long ago that it's almost as sure that students pay little heed to the incredibly insightful and wise feedback that I used to give them on their papers (picture my sideways grin).  Perhaps, I learned this by seeing so many of my painstakingly marked papers left in desks, on floors or in the garbage can.  Perhaps, I learned this by having to repeat the same feedback over and over and wondering what is wrong with "those kids?!"  Either way, I learned that kids only wanted to see the mark and that my feedback, no matter how positive its intent, was seen as criticism...and not the motivating kind.

An article in the March 26 edition of ASDC's Inservice magazine addressed this issue and I thought some of the ideas were brilliant!  The teacher in this article, Melissa Poole, not only noticed that her students were not paying attention to her feedback, but she also noticed that he students really did not know how to give meaningful feedback to their peers.  She commented, "Too often, feedback is just a way to justify a grade, rather than help students improve."   As a result, Poole decided that she needed to model good feedback for them and she needed to "show" them how to use this feedback to improve their performance.  She looked to innovative technology to assist her with this new best practice.

First, she uses free screencasting applications such as Jing to record herself marking and commenting on the paper and how to make improvements.  Teachers could also use the very simple LiveScribe audio PDF application to get similar results.  Next, she uploads the videos to a private channel on YouTube for the student to view.  One could also opt to use their course management system to upload the videos or they could be emailed to the students.

Finally, she set up virtual "office hours" in Google Docs telling her students she'd be live on Google Docs during certain hours, and that they should log on at those times and share their work in progress to get live feedback.  Again, this could be accomplished using any variety of course management applications, such as Moodle.

To me, there is no better example of looking to innovative technologies to help solve an age-old issue than this.  If you would like to do something similar, please let me know!