Introducing: The Rise Model of feedback

Think about your last observation.  It's nerve-wracking, even for a veteran teacher, to have an administrator walk into your room, laptop in hand.  When you get to the post-conference, it is completely disheartening when the only news they have for you is bad.

Even if they try to couch their negative feedback in coaching terms, it's still hard to hear:

"Have you considered using method x instead of the method you used?"

"What have you done to try and make class more engaging?"

These are tough questions and they make us worry about our teaching, our reputation and even the security of our jobs.

Instead, we'd like to hear some of what we did well, maybe an affirmation of our value to the department, or a thank you for the work we've been doing.  If that could be paired with some suggestions for future projects or a partnership with a colleague who is an expert in a particular field, it's a great post conference.

But how do we give feedback to students?

If we only write comments about things that need to improve, it's disheartening, maybe even demoralizing to the student.  Even if the ratio is 50% positive, 50% negative, the student is likely not motivated by the results.

Emily Wray created the Rise Model to help create "positive, productive changes" to student work.  (She's also got a fascinating website).

The Rise Model

While the Rise Model is certainly useful for teachers to provide student feedback, this same model can be used for student-student peer feedback.

Wray also created a Rise Model for self-evaluation.

Introducing: Draftback

I recently learned about a Chrome extension called Draftback.  It will playback all of the revisions made to a google doc as a movie. It will also create graphs that show how the revision of the document has progressed over time.

On one hand, this is a very cool way to look at how documents we write (or kids write) actually come into being. It shows every keystroke (slowly or quickly - you choose the speed) that created the finished product.

On the other hand, Draftback can be used to look at document creation of potentially dubious origin.  If you suspect a student copy and pasted research into his research paper, you can watch it happen in Draftback.

Draftback will also create a graph of the creation of the work, showing times and dates of revision as well as the position on the document.   Here's a screenshot of what that graph looks like.

You can imagine how valuable a graph like this would be to help students understand their own writing process (and to help us look at our own).

Draftback is a Chrome extension available for free here.  

If you'd like to read more about it, here's an article.

Let me know if you'd like help getting started using this very cool tool.