Grading and Feedback

Yesterday, I received an email from one of my amazing and thoughtful students. She is currently in a field experience placement where she is practicing the "real work" of teaching, including providing feedback to her students. The subject of her email was "Grading and Feedback," and I'm sharing it here with her permission (edited slightly for confidentiality):

Hello Dr. Mulder,  

I have been doing my field experience practicum in a sixth grade class and have been learning so much. One thing that I have been recently faced with is grading and giving feedback and you came to mind. I gave the students a summary exercise in which they had to write a summary paragraph. I am now reviewing these and am realizing my inexperience with grading REAL kids’ work! 

I don’t want to kill their joy for learning, but I also want to give the valuable feedback that will help them grow. How do you strike this balance (especially in middle school)? 

Thank you for your time in considering this.  

First off, how great is this? A pre-service teacher who is in transition to the work of a professional teacher, and she is beginning to realize the challenging nature of our work as educators. But rather than just foundering, she is soliciting input! I'm honored that she reached out to me--not that I have this all figured out, of course--but the key thing I'm thinking about here is the importance of mentorship and support for novice professional teachers.

Here is what I shared with her in response:

I am so glad you're thinking this through with feedbacking on real work! It's not easy, is it? I always appreciate Rick Wormeli's advice for providing feedback to students: it must be timely, specific, and actionable. Timely, meaning they have to get your comments in a reasonable amount of time. Specific, meaning you name particular things they did well, and particular areas of growth. Actionable, meaning that they know what to do differently next time to be specific, or (even better) that they have the opportunity right away to revise the work. 

Here are a few strategies that you might think about using:

• One approach I like is a feedback sandwich: Start with something positive you noticed, and then offer some critique of things they can improve, and wrap up with a positive statement of either something else you appreciated in the work or a statement of your confidence in their learning. This sort of warm feedback--cool feedback--warm feedback often is well-received by students.

• Depending on the particular assignment, sometimes it works well to take note for yourself of common mistakes/problem areas from throughout the class, and verbally provide this feedback to the whole group. (You certainly can leave brief written feedback on their work as well!) Taking this approach, you might notice common grammar errors, or common calculation errors, or something like that. When you meet up with the whole class, demonstrate what the error looks like, and ask them to go back through their work to see if they can find places where they made that error, and give them the opportunity to name it, and perhaps even correct it for themselves. This sort of rehearsal helps them correct their misunderstandings--one of the key aspects of feedback!

• Having specific criteria in mind for what you are looking for as you provide feedback really helps. I find that if I don't have particular criteria in mind when I approach students' work, I am much more haphazard in the feedback I provide, and it ends up being a lot more of, "I really liked this..." or "This is weak." Not that these kinds of evaluative comments are bad, exactly...but they aren't really specific about the quality of the work students did. Having pre-determined criteria helps me to be more deliberate and efficient in the feedbacking, because I know what I’m looking for, and I know what aspects of the work I'll focus on in my comments to them.

• I have found that grades are often not an effective form of feedback. Students seem conditioned to just look at the grade, and not deeply consider any comments you might offer on their work. So if it's possible and reasonable to do so, just leave comments without adding a grade, if you really want them to consider your feedback.

• Time is always an issue! If it's reasonable to do so, see if you can split the class into thirds, and only give detailed feedback to students on every third assignment. Certainly read and briefly respond to the other students' work, but this can help alleviate the time crunch that most teachers feel when it comes to providing high-quality feedback.

I hope this gives some direction! Blessings to you in your teaching and learning. :-) 

Dr. Mulder

What do you think, my fellow educators? What other advice can we give to help novice professional teachers start off well in their work of grading and providing feedback to their students?

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