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.

Why students ignore our comments

As teachers, it makes us feel better — like we’re doing our jobs — when we give lots of pointed feedback. But how much does it help kids when we overwhelm them and they can’t actually use any of it? - Matt Miller

For many of us, the problem with feedback we give to students is that they just don't seem to want it that badly.  

One of the realities for our students is that our feedback is only one part their very long days. Depending on what that student has going on that day, the analysis of Hamlet we assigned might not be very high on the priority list.  They twelve comments we make on that analysis just might be an awful lot of commentary on a piece that has several problems:

1.  It's over.
2. The student won't be writing another one.
3.  The student might not have cared about it that much anyway.

In a recent blog post, however, Matt Miller cites another, more subtle problem:

There’s this thing called cognitive load. It’s the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory. I figured that if I gave students more than one or two suggestions during their writing, it would be more like cognitive OVERload. So I chose my feedback wisely.

It’s like coaching little kids to hit a baseball. They have a LOT to learn. If you tell them seven different things to remember when they go to bat, they won’t remember any of them.

One way for us to provide feedback to students that they will actually use is to make wise choices about when and how much feedback we give.  Miller's answer is to provide it immediately (by walking around the room) and to give the most pointed, specific feedback possible.

It's a nice discussion of feedback in the first half of the post.