Week 5 | How do students know... | #Teach180

I've been reflecting a lot about how students know that they are learning. Feedback is hard to do well. I feel that no matter how hard I try, my feedback is either timely or useful; rarely both...

Because of this, I am on a quest to improve the clarity of my feedback while also creating experiences for students to self evaluate their understanding. During the 5th week of school, feedback seemed to be a topic that kept showing up. Join me on this reflection of my week of feedback!

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Rubrics and Conferences

After hours of grading, I finally finished up the first project grades for my seniors. To make my workflow easier, I printed out blank rubrics to write down my feedback so that I could pull up each report on my computer. I was very pleased with the rubric because the final grades would typically come out right where I would have predicted with a quick read through. This allowed me to thoroughly assign scores and provide comments where needed. 

Having these copies made the grading process very smooth but I wasn't sure how I was going to share them with my students. They completed their blog post write ups as a group and I wanted to make sure that they all got a chance to see their results but I also didn't want to lose MY record of how their scores were calculated. In the end, I called each group up to the front of the room during work time and had mini conferences with each group where I got to walk through their projects and provide some praises and pushes. I found this individualized feedback to be very valuable as it showed them that I truly did read through each report and provided an opportunity for a two-way discussion. 

#Day20: Held conferences with each group to talk through the first project scores #payattention2therubric #Teach180 pic.twitter.com/bM1Knt0FHO

— Joe Cossette (@cossettej) October 6, 2015

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#Day21: can you create a mathematical model to make your pendulum swing to the beat of any song? #PBLchat #Teach180 pic.twitter.com/vlq3o9AHC6

— Joe Cossette (@cossettej) October 6, 2015

In class challenges

Another way that students get an idea of their progress is through in class challenges. As part of the pendulum project that we've been working on, students were required to use their data to set up their pendulum so that it swung to the tempo of a song of my choice. This was a powerful indicator to show them how well their models worked. This was a part of their project score but the feedback was clear to them long before they ever receive their rubrics because they each got to see their results during their project demonstration.

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Open Note Quizzes

I give quizzes all. the. time.

Each quiz is usually a half sheet of paper with a problem or two from the previous day's content. What makes this unique is that I let them use whatever resources they want as long as they complete their quiz individually. As I frequently remind them, my quizzes are "Open note but NOT open neighbor". Because of this, I'm not testing their memorization but rather, their application. Often, this results in on-the-spot learning or relearning of the information as they go through the notes to find the information that they can use to apply to the problem.

I'm usually very fast with the grading of these quizzes but the important feedback that I want them to get happens during the process. Putting them on the spot with these relatively low stakes assessment provides them with the opportunity to locate holes that may have seemed easy when working with the class but have a much different result on their own. It's easy to save the individual studying and review until the day or two before the test. These quizzes serve as check points along the way so this doesn't happen.

#Day22: Frequent open note quizzes often leads to on-the-spot learning. #AtLeastTheyAreLearning #Teach180 pic.twitter.com/g8tf2UIP7t

— Joe Cossette (@cossettej) October 8, 2015

When asked about what parts of the class that have been the most effective in helping them learn, over 80% of students responded favorably that the quizzes have been helpful to them. I love seeing this kind of self awareness and reflection!

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#Day23: iPad session with @MHSTechPD has inspired me to look deeper into applications for @PearDeck in the classroom #Teach180 #tonkalearns

— Joe Cossette (@cossettej) October 8, 2015

Tech Feedback

I'm very fortunate to work at a school that values providing professional development opportunities. During my half day with a sub watching my classes, I attended an iPad training session with the other second year teachers in the school. During this session, I really started to dig into Pear Deck as a possible tool for providing valuable formative feedback during class. They just added the option to send students a report of the session so that they can take the feedback with them. This has been the feature that I've been waiting for!! I hope to have more to share about this as the year progresses :)

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Burn Baby Burn!

So this one isn't really feedback focused but I couldn't resist. My freshmen class finally got to start using the Bunsen burners and I've noticed that student engagement and fire are directly related. In this experiment, they had to identify the "mystery metal" that was on the inside of a penny. Many knew that already that the the metal was zinc but they had to defend this hypothesis with melting point observations and density measurements. 

What's cooler than melting some pennies on a Friday? Science rocks!

#Day24: using Bunsen burners to separate then find density for the different metals in a penny #Teach180 pic.twitter.com/OhYhcTmwth

— Joe Cossette (@cossettej) October 9, 2015