The Feedback Loop

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, ...

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?"