Starting this fall, my 7th, 8th, and 10th grade English students will use the following rubric to help guide their interactions with feedback. The descriptions on this rubric stem from both our Floop-teachers’ experiences in the classroom and also UK-based feedback expert, Dr. Naomi Winstone’s research findings.

What excites me about this rubric is that the complex task of the feedback process has been simplified into three distinct moments for discussion and reflection. They are: seeking feedback, making sense of feedback, and using feedback to learn.

My plan is to assess just one assignment according to this rubric at the beginning, middle, and end of the year. For other assignments, students will self-assess and share their findings. The rubric can be our starting point for class discussions on feedback and 1:1 conferences.

Note the importance of having clear work-in-progress assignments so students can show evidence of feedback literacy in this way.

My work-in-progress assignme…

Using Red Font Influences the Emotional Perception of Critical Performance Feedback  Bertrams, Alex Althaus, Lea Boss, Tina Furrer, Patricia Jegher, Ladina C. Soszynska, Paulina Tschumi, Vinzenz (2019)
The participants’ subsequent evaluation of the feedback revealed that using red in the feedback caused the feedback to be perceived as relatively less emotionally positive. 
Using a red font indirectly had an adverse effect on the cognitive feedback perception, mediated via the emotional feedback perception.Big Take-Away: Be cautious with that red pen when giving feedback!

Helping Students Learn by Giving Feedback The Floop Peer Review tools lets teachers run a rapid, anonymous, and scaffolded peer review session during a single class period. After as little as 30 minutes, students have given and received three to five pieces of detailed peer feedback, focused on a specific criteria set by the teacher. Each sample of work a student sees receives feedback structured by the questions:

     1. How much do you agree that the criteria has been met?      2. What do you see in the work sample that supports your opinion?      3. How might your peer improve on the criteria?      4. What would you like to celebrate about this work sample?
Create an assignment Give it a specific criteria to guide the peer review. 
Monitor student submissions as they come in Have students submit & click "Run Peer Review"
Monitor the peer review session during class Give teacher feedback while students work Investigate interesting results & follow up Try Floop

Every time I try a new unit, it seems like giving formative feedback is a more daunting task than usual. There are problems that crop up that I can’t anticipate as well as new activities and assessments to design. Time for prep and feedback are both in short supply.

Still, I was energized by Floop’s recent research on holistic feedback systems and wanted to add a new feedback activity to the mix.

Here’s what my lesson planning looked like on our formative “feedback days.”
Entry Task: self-assessmentLearning Activities: peer review, discussion, revision planningTeacher Task: Select exactly one criterion per student necessitating teacher feedback. Make that selection based on self-assessment and peer review results. After skimming the feedback forms for self-assessment and then peer review data, I asked myself: where can I make the most impact in a short amount of time? Having students color-code their results traffic light style made the work more visible and therefore faster as I mov…

“Ms. Matlick, I start to shake when I get on stage. I literally can almost throw up,” one student tells me.

We have been knee-deep in a research process for three weeks now as my students prep for writing their own informative TED talks on topics of their choosing. At the end of the unit, they will each stand on a red-dotted stage and present their information in front of their peers. Many are excited, but several are naturally apprehensive, or worse.

The public speaking element of the project certainly ups the stakes, and giving the kids many opportunities to test out the stage and their material in front of small groups will do a lot to build confidence.

But as we head into the drafting and revision stage of the writing process, I’m reminded of a post by Floop co-founder Christine Witcher. She wrote about how feedback exchanges themselves in any context can be emotionally charged, too. She suggests that by not only preparing kids in the traditional sense for the task at hand, we shoul…

This article originally appeared in EdSurge.
"Are you going to resubmit your chemical changes model?" Valentina asked Jayda.
"I'm not sure,” Jayda responded, “I'm already at proficient and I understand all the concepts, so mastery work wouldn't really be worth it for me." 
Hearing a student say that work isn’t worth it would send most teachers into a downward spiral, but these words brought me joy. Jayda was confident that she understood the material, and hearing her make a choice not to pursue additional work for the purpose of chasing an extra few points on her grade made me proud.
At Forest Ridge, an independent all-girls school serving students in grades 5-12 in Bellevue, Wash., we've been grappling with how to support students in focusing on growth over grades for years.
In 2016, our school began putting intentional effort into getting our students to value the learning process and to focus on growth rather than grades. At the same time, our m…

This article original appeared in EdSurge.

Over winter break in 2015, I found myself scouring the internet for career alternatives that would take me out of the classroom. I was in my fifth year of teaching at Forest Ridge, an independent all-girls school serving students in grades 5-12 in Bellevue, Wash., and I was feeling isolated in a room with students who didn’t seem to want to engage with my class, despite all my efforts to bring enthusiasm and passion to my work. The learning environment was tense, my students were angsty and I didn't have the information or strategies to make it better. I wanted to go back to my previous life as a geologist, where everything was quantifiable and the path forward was always revealed through methodical data analysis. Little did I know that by 2019 I would find a way to apply the data science strategies I learned as a geologist to bring joy and engagement back to my classroom. This Class is Unfair The pivotal class I was teaching at the time …

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
Part 2 - Engaging with Criteria
Part 3 - Actively Seeking Feedback


So far we've established that students need to be emotionally open to feedback, they need to understand the grading criteria, and they should be encouraged to seek out feedback. Your students are primed and ready for meaningful feedback...but then it never comes. According to my students and students across the globe, this is common. They know they need feedback but they aren't getting enough...or maybe it's just not getting to them?

In order for feedback to be useful it must be accessible. This means that it must arrive in a timely manner, it must make it to them both literally and cognitively, and it must be comprehendible. If you've done the wo…

Washington state is becoming the first in the nation to include student voice as a standard in the edTPA teacher certification portfolio assessment. They define student voice as:
Ongoing reflective self-assessment expressed in the words of the learner for the purpose of improving teaching and learning.  The edTPA breaks the portfolio down into three tasks: planning, instruction, and assessment, and plans to add a rubric addressing student voice to each of the tasks.

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. 

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
Part 2 - Engaging with Criteria



Winstone, Nash, Parker, & Rowntree (2017) argue that proactive recipience is necessary for students to fully benefit from feedback information. Proactive recipience is "a state or activity of engaging actively with feedback processes, thus emphasizing the fundamental contribution and responsibility of the learner.” The information communicated in formative feedback is just part of the equation; it won't have significant impacts on student learning unless students also develop feedback literacy and the agency to act on feedback.

Creating systems that encourage student to actively seek out feedback, and planning activities that teach the skills of seeking feedback, will support student…

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?"

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.

Most of us have experienced that moment where you pass back papers, full of rich and detailed feedback, and watch a student walk out of class and drop it in the recycling. It's hard not to take it personally. Why do some of our students struggle so much with receiving and using feedback?

When students provide feedback to each other on presentations, do you wonder:
How do I help students give each other meaningful feedback?How do I keep all students engaged during presentations and presentation feedback? One solution to both of these challenges is assigning feedback roles.
Roles during practice presentations For team presentations, I have students practice and give feedback with another team. For the team presenting, all team members stand and present as if it were the real thing. For the team giving feedback, each person focuses on a different aspect of presentation feedback. Here are roles I've used for 3-4 people teams:
Content - Provide feedback on the content of the presentationPresentation Skills - Observe and provide feedback on presentation skills and slide designTimer - Write down the times for each part of the presentation (or video tape it!) If you provide each role feedback guidelines, like a checklist, questions, or rubric, it can help students give each…