Blog Challenge: Day 14

What is feedback for learning, and how well do you give it to students?

This is an area I struggle with FOR SURE! In an ideal world, my classroom would operate more like a series of conversations than a sequence of events. I try my very best to communicate with students in a relaxed way to help them understand and to explain, re-explain, and explain again. I have realized that talking doesn't work for all students! My auditory kids do great, but they needed other ways to show their learning.

Enter: Interactive Notebooks

Notebooks give us visuals to add to our conversations. We do puzzles and sorting to help the kinesthetic learners. How in the world do you give all those different kinds of kids feedback?

I typically grade notebooks on test days; however, I try to create several "check-ins" throughout the unit to see where the students are at. Sometime the check-in is sort of impromptu and I will check their notebook before they pack up to leave. Other times, I check them after school without them knowing, leaving notes, stars, and stickers for them in their notebook. For check-ins I usually just look at whether they are keeping up and will check an assignment from that day, like a short writing prompt.

For example, when we were about half-way through our Evolution unit, I gave them a diagram that had an example of natural selection with rabbits and foxes. It had pictures, but very little explanation. We had some time left at the end of the day, so students had about 15-20 minutes to write at least six sentences in response to "How is natural selection related to the diagram?". Simple. Almost no planning on my part. They could look through their notes and review what we had talked about so far. It took me very little time to read their 6 sentences, and I wasn't reading them for grammar perfection or for completeness. I just read them to see if they were grasping the major concepts. Did they mention the slower rabbits dying but the faster ones surviving? Did they say that the faster ones could reproduce? Did they say that they could pass on the gene to be faster? Kids who did a good job found underlines for the awesome sentences and stickers showing them they did a great job. Kids who gave me limited answers found comments like "Why? How? Define?" We talked about it in class the next day and they could revise their answer.

Of course I use tests and quizzes to provide more formal feedback, but I feel like that by the time we get to a test, they (and I) are ready to move on. There has to be little bits of feedback along the way. I'm working on being better at providing that feedback in multiple ways -- written and verbal.

Suggestions always welcome! What types of formative assessment do you use?