That was a 4 out of 10 Sir! The Value of Regular Student Feedback


Well, after the rather lengthy philosophising of my first post, here's a quick overview of an approach which has been working well for me recently. Inspired by reading Teaching As Leadership (many thanks to my HOD for gifting it to me) I took these steps:
  1. Talk to the students about 'Big Goals' – setting quantifiable, measurable and ambitious achievement goals with them. In our case, it was to achieve ten marks of progress between their Eng Lang mock and the real exam
  2. Talk to them about what would be needed to achieve these goals – basically, good lessons from me, and real effort from them
  3. Give them an exit ticket at the end of every lesson, on which they had to note what they'd learnt, then give a mark out of 10 for the quality of the lesson, and the same for the degree of effort they thought they'd put in
  4. Begin each lesson with a report of the previous lesson's scores, and a quick reflection on whether it was good enough to keep us on track or not (I have to say that there was a degree of creativity in the analysis – I obviously wasn't going to start inputting all the numbers into a spreadsheet, so some of the figures, eg 'overall last lesson got a 7.25 average from you, and you gave yourselves 6.8 for effort' were guesstimated fabrication on the basis of a quick look through the tickets whilst on gate-duty or whatever!)
I think myself and the students have benefitted from the focus and reflection this has brought. In particular, I've enjoyed being able to engage with individual students whilst the lesson has been going on, posing questions such as:
  • What are you giving this lesson at the moment? What needs to happen to get the score up?
  • What effort are you giving yourself at the moment? Is that enough?
We've had a lot of fun with this: “A five?! Are you kidding me?! How can this be a five! I spent ages preparing this!”, and also a lot of genuine reflection and adjustments to practice from myself and from the students – my teaching practice and their learning practice. I've thought more about the quality of learning in every lesson, and adjusted lessons as they were happening in response to 'half way point' student feedback. It's also been powerful I think when lessons haven't gone well, leading to an evidence-based autopsy at the start of the next lesson: “So – what went wrong? I think I should have given you a model (or whatever) – what do you think?” - basically lots of rich discussion of learning has emerged.

Of course, there was always the matter of dealing with the natural anxiety provoked by getting instant feedback from the kids. In all honesty, once we'd done it a couple of times, this wasn't a problem – as a class, we celebrated good lessons, and puzzled over where things had gone wrong when scores were low. How to feel better about getting student feedback on the quality of lessons? Get it all the time!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Distinctiveness of the "vente-privee" brand: end of the legal saga?

 First questioned by Showroomprive.com for its usual character and its lack of distinctiveness, the French semi-figurative mark n ° 4055655 "vente-privee" associated with a butterfly design filed in classes 35, 38 and 41 l t prevails not only on the ground of distinctiveness but also on that of the defect of fraudulent character. private-salee.jpg This legal joust began in 2013. The Paris tribunal de grande instance (TGI Paris, 3e ch., 1re sect., 28 Nov. 2013, n ° 12/12856, D. 2015. 230, obs. J.-P Clavier, N. Martial-Braz and C. Zolynski; Légipresse 2014. 12 et les obs.) Had then canceled the word mark “vente privee.com” n ° 3623085 for lack of distinctive character. In 2015, following the appeal against this judgment, the Paris Court of Appeal (Paris, pole 5 - 1st ch., March 31, 2015, n ° 13/23127, D. 2016. 396, obs. J.-P. Clavier, N. Martial-Braz and C. Zolynski) had finally admitted the distinctive character of the mark acquired through use. The judges had taken into acco...
Read more

'Teachers Talking About Teaching': the evolution of TLCs

Image
Tim Brighouse in his  'four ways you know you are in a good school' , suggested the following four indicators of success:  “Teachers talk about teaching, teachers observe each other’s practice, teachers plan, organise and evaluate their work together rather than separately, and that teachers teach each other.”. The final three are offshoots of the first, and in this post I'll describe ways in which my school is trying to develop conditions in which teacher dialogue about the detail of classroom practice is regular, supportive and influential. In the past, one of the methods we've tried to use is the 'Teacher Learning Community' model, whereby INSET time is dedicated to placing groups of colleagues together for the purposes of discussion and  professional learning. In theory, this ticks all of the Brighouse boxes and when launched a few years ago, was received with optimism from school leaders: 'teachers', 'learning' and 'communities' were...
Read more

Training days for Intia on IP- Patents and trademarks & Tradition has no form: the protection of a design does not depend on the type of product to which it is incorporated

 Within the training work carried out by AB ASESORES, assistance to public organizations and companies is framed so that they can carry out the most appropriate procedures in relation to their Industrial Property. A complete knowledge of the legal framework is essential, not only for the realization of records, but for the definition of an adequate strategy that is compatible with the legal possibilities of protection. In this context, on September 8, a training session was held for the staff of the Navarran public company INTIA on Trademarks and their relationship with Denominations of Origin and Protected Geographical Indications, in which they delved into the singularities of collective trademarks and guarantee as fundamental tools in the reinforcement or consolidation of the protection of quality or geographical names within the agri-food sector. These are fundamental issues that are also affected by different laws that make this matter particularly complex, with the dispariti...
Read more