Happy September! It’s time to get back into the swing of things and start thinking about your students your classroom your lessons your lesson plans and above all on the "things to think about" list… grading papers. No matter what your subject area happens to be, you will inevitably find yourself spending most of your time grading and giving feedback to students. Sometimes it’s verbal feedback, sometimes it’s feedback through your body language and sometimes it’s written feedback. The latter is what I would like to focus on in this blog post because I believe it is the most difficult to do efficiently and effectively. You spend hours and hours during the week and on weekends grading papers and if the feedback is not understandable or is not effective than you are wasting your time.
Verbal feedback gives you the advantage of matching words with the appropriate tone and the appropriate expression. This is something that is very hard to accomplish giving written feedback. Choose words and phrases to present your feedback in such a way that your students hear what you intend. Words can often be misconstrued and while there are good intentions, feedback often shuts down learning and cause an environment in which the student is merely following instructions rather than applying knowledge.
Hopefully everyone was able to take a look at How to Give Effective Feedback to your Students, our PD book over the summer. The chapter on written feedback gives three specifics to remember: clarity, specificity and tone.
Clarity- Use simple vocabulary and sentence structure and use words and phrases that allow the student to hear what you intend. Try to stay from complex vocabulary that shows what you know rather than what the student needs.
Specificity- Try to be specific, but not too specific. What does that mean? The chapter warns against copyediting every error for a student and them having them “correct” their mistakes when it’s you who did all the work. Let's be honest, it is sometimes impossible for any teacher to let all those grammatical and syntax errors go unnoticed but while the teacher means well this type of feedback often times shuts down learning and cause an environment in which the student is merely following instructions rather than applying knowledge. You should also try not to be too broad or general with your comments. Let the students know what you want them to do so that they can use past knowledge to accomplish it.
Tone- Just like oral feedback, written feedback can have a “tone” to it that can be either positive or negative. While both positives and negatives are necessary, word choice and style is a huge factor in getting the message you want across to the student. The chapter talks about trying to inspire rather than deflate your students and to try to accomplish this by painting the students in a way that communicates to them that they are responsible for their learning.
As always with professional development you should try to take away one or two things that make sense to you and try to apply them. I encourage you to read chapter three of How to Give Effective Feedback to your Students, if you haven't done so already, for a more in-depth look at giving written feedback and the rest of the book as well as it goes into the other types of feedback that we, as educators, find ourselves giving every day.
I hope everyone had a great first week! Our kids are lucky to have you.
Reference:
Brookhart, Susan M., How to Give Effective Feedback to your Students (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2008).
