Skip to main content

Adding a Feedback Question to Daily Warm-ups

Do you check in with your students every day? Maybe a warm up or exit ticket? Amy Morriss, who teaches high school Physics, Engineering, and Robotics outside of New Orleans, LA, uses a graphic organizer for problem solving and elevated her bell work to include a feedback question: 

We set professional goals at the beginning of the year, and my goal was around more and earlier intervention on problem solving in Physics. A lot of kids seem to get it, but then they get to the test and then can't execute on problem solving. 

I created a graphic organizer to guide students through the problem solving process as well as a checklist (did you check sig figs, etc.). Students solve a problem using the organizer as bell work every day. At the bottom of the graphic organizer, they can evaluate how they feel about their problem solving (pretty good, meh, poor), and they have a space for them to ask me a question. When they complete their bell work, they submit it to me through Floop.
Problem solving graphic organizer for Physics word problems. Click here to download a PDF.
I've just implemented this over the past few weeks, and it's really helped me identify how my students are doing because I have just one problem that I'm grading a bunch. And, usually, you have some kids in class that don't want to ask questions. They don't want to admit "I don't know something," or they're shy. Now they can ask me a question, and they have a regular formatted way to do it, so I can respond to the question on Floop. It's been a really useful tool for me to nail what's going on every day.

While the biggest problem Floop solved for me was being able to efficiently provide meaningful feedback, a benefit I discovered is that now I use feedback data to help me make decisions. For Physics, I give specific feedback on specific problems. By looking and seeing how many times I'm making the same comment (I've given feedback on problem #9 fourteen times!), I can see that I need to either revisit that skill or see how the problem can be clarified.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Back-to-School: Consider Your Feedback System, Not Grading System

One question I ask other teachers is “How important is feedback in learning?” Every teacher I talk to agrees that feedback is crucial. It’s how both teacher and student gets better. Research backs the importance of feedback; building off of John Hattie’s work comparing factors on learning, Evidence for Learning’s toolkit ranks feedback as having the highest impact out of their 34 approaches (along with meta-cognition) with a +8 months’ impact on students’ learning progress. I follow the feedback question with “How important are grades in learning?” It might seem like a loaded question. You can imagine how teachers respond: “They’re not.” Why give grades, then? We’ll save that topic for another occasion. For now, I just want to point out that we are frequently asked to consider and describe our grading system by students, parents, colleagues, and administrators. We’re rarely asked about the much bigger and more important component of our work: feedback. With back-to-school qu

A Culture of Iteration: Policies and Practices for a Revision-FocusedClassroom

Success in the real world depends on a person's ability to iterate. to understand the definition of success on a task to seek feedback early and often to use that feedback to revise and refine until successful As teachers, its our job to scaffold this process, with developmentally-appropriate differentiation, until our students can fly solo. As I sit here writing this, my  SO  Dan is at his desk  red-lining  a building diagram for a warehouse in Canada. When he's done, the diagram will go back to his team of engineers where they will respond to Dan's feedback with a better design. They'll repeat this process until both building code and client requirements have been met. To do this work, which requires an iteration cycle that can last over a year or more, Dan has to understand building code and client needs, seek feedback from other engineers and the client, and use that feedback to revise and refine until the design is ready for implementation. ​Dan wasn'

Part 2 - Tools for an Equitable Feedback System: Engaging with Criteria

This series of posts will cover a variety of bite-sized strategies that can be incorporated into a more holistic feedback system. To learn more about the research behind these approaches, we recommend you first read our white paper . Part 1 - Feedback is Emotional For feedback information to be useful, it must communicate:  Where am I going? (What are the goals?) How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?) Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?) (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).  Supporting students in engaging with the grading criteria helps give context to the feedback to come. In other words, it does the groundwork of helping them determine for themselves, "Where am I going?"