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.

A (way) better way to do discussion

Teachers sometimes ask me for a tool they can use to accomplish an objective in the classroom.

Often, this becomes a simple substitution.

The thinking goes like this:

I want to do a discussion with my kids.

What tool can I use improve my discussion?

There are tools for that.  Classroom has a Question feature, and, depending on what you're trying to do, Slack, sli.do, or Padlet can do the job.

But really, it's the decisions that you make after the tool decision that make a difference in instruction.

I was recently working with a teacher to revise a lesson that involved discussion. The teacher wanted to increase student engagement and be as efficient as possible to meet his objectives.

He chose the Question feature in Classroom to facilitate the discussion.  By using Classroom, the students could now interact with their groups while the teacher was able to evaluate everyone on the same day, instead of listening to several speeches that were all basically the same.

Plus one for efficiency.

But the assignment also raised the level of student engagement in addition to being more efficient.

Students presented thesis statements, chose the best one to start and then got right to the hard work of looking at how the evidence in the article supported that thesis statement.  The teacher considered this the most important objective and the revised discussion allowed students to spend more time working on it than the previous version.

The revised discussion also added a reflective writing component.  Students discussed evidence and how the author used it, and then they wrote about the process in response to a Question in Classroom.  This process gave them another chance at formulating their thoughts and also allowed them to synthesize their own thoughts with the findings of their group.

Finally, the grading rubric for the activity also changed.  Because the activity had a more clear focus, the rubric could more specifically address some of the objectives in descriptive language. The rubric now details expectations in language guided by Marzano. It also incorporates a version of Marzano's grading scales to evaluate student work.

The teacher, by being open to trying a discussion with new tools, and by experimenting with instructional designs, was able to create a new framework for discussion and assessment that increased both student engagement and instructional clarity in a shorter time frame.

My first Pear Deck

I tried peardeck for the first time this week and really liked how it helped me meet the objectives I was trying to meet - and it was fun!

Peardeck creates interactive slides.  Kids can respond from their device (phone, laptop, tablet) and the teacher can decide to show those responses as a group.

There some limitations to what peardeck can do, but it's ease of logging in and the interactive quality is excellent.

Here's their intro video if you're interested in a nice teaser.