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:

Feedback: Timely, Specific, and Actionable

It has been an incredibly busy season of writing for me lately. My dissertation is coming together, and in fact, I have finished writing all five chapters! That doesn't mean the work is complete, however. There are ongoing edits, and then the preparation for the defense when there is a "final" document ready. But it feels really, really good to be at this point.

The best part of being "finished" is that there now is THE THING that can be addressed for the edits. My advisor has been fantastic throughout this process: he gives me feedback that is timely, specific, and actionable, and the turn-around for his comments on each draft has been amazing. I am able to see the strengths and weaknesses of different sections of my writing, where the ideas are solid, and where I need to rethink things. Each draft I work through is a little better than the last, and I am confident that the next draft is going to be even better than the last one I submitted. (At this point, it feels like there is always a "next draft"...but I know the time is coming when it's going to be good enough.)

My writing desk...it's getting worse, but the writing is getting better...

This experience has me thinking about the way teachers provide feedback to their students.

Grading? Correcting? Marking?

It's the end of the semester. Papers, projects, tests...they're all rolling in.

My colleagues and I were having an impromptu meeting in the hall the other day (we do that) and after some shared laughs, I reluctantly said, "Well, I better get back to marking..."

And one of my colleagues said something like, "Dave's always 'marking.' You sound so Canadian." [I am not Canadian, by the way...but I had a Canadian roommate once...]

"What do you call it?" I asked.

"I say 'correcting,'" my colleague responded.

And another colleague said, "I say 'grading.' I have grading to do..."

And we laughed again.

But now I'm thinking about this. I know I used to call it "grading" too. And I think--back at the beginning of my teaching career, when I taught math and had a lot of papers coming across my desk every day--I used to call it "correcting" too.

Does the name we use for assessing and evaluating students' work matter?

Image by psychobabble [CC BY-ND 2.0]

Feedback and Grading

I came across this great graphic from Educational Leadership while browsing on Zite the other day.

It was a good, if challenging, find in light of where I am in the semester. Here at the end of the semester I find I am so focused on exams and marking and assigning grades that I don't always think about feedback as much as I might at other times in the semester.

So I'm thinking again about my students' learning. What am I most interested in? That they can check everything off as "completed" on a list of tasks? That they have submitted all of their assignments? That they score at least 80% on their final exams? Or that they really learn the material?

If I want them to really learn, I think it has to be more about feedback than about "grading." The takeaways below challenged me to think again about the role of feedback. 

It's not all about the grade. It's all about the learning.

As shared by edte.ch

Standards-Based Assessment and College Readiness

I recently received this email from a former student who is working in a school exploring standards-based assessment:

Hi Dave!

Long time, no see! I am emailing you as credible source on standards-based grading. I have been doing digging with this stuff and I feel like I have somewhat of a good grasp on what it does and how it's assessed. My only question is how it aligns with college readiness. Being that you seem to have some knowledge in this area :) and are at higher education level, could you help me answer this question? I am interested in it and think it is beneficial to help kids really learn the content, but I just feel that this is what is holding me back from being completely on board with this new system and mindset.

Thanks for your help in advance!


What a great question! I was glad she asked.

I had to think about my response a bit. Does standards-based assessment help prepare students for life beyond school, whether that means college or other opportunities? I think it does.

Here's my best thinking on this for now, and subject to future revision:

Student Evaluation Surveys: Keys to Successful Implementation

Hmmm...good question...

This past Sunday night I was able to get in on #iaedchat (Iowa education chat) on Twitter again after having missed for several weeks. It's a great group of educators over there--many from Iowa, but not all--who are passionate and thoughtful and want to talk about things that matter in education today. This week's chat was about the role of surveys in education.

Surveys are a great way to collect information...if they are done right. As we discussed together, we noted that there are several possible failure points in regard to surveys:

Fish Climbing Trees: Assessment, Feedback, and Differentiation

One of the best sessions I had the chance to attend at the recent Association for Middle Level Education conference (#AMLE2013) was a session on formative assessment, summative judgment, and descriptive feedback presented by Rick Wormeli. In the session, Rick shared this cartoon, which I had seen before:

"For a fair selection, everybody has to take the same exam:
Please climb that tree."

The argument usually made by folks sharing this cartoon is that we should have different standards of assessment for different students, because the students are clearly unique individuals with different strengths and weaknesses and it isn't fair to hold them all to the same standards. Because it's not going to be any problem for the monkey to climb the tree, right? But how is the fish going to get up there? Or the elephant? Or even the dog?