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.

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.

Preaching to the choir?

We certainly think that laptops improve learning, but until now, there haven't been many studies to prove it.

In December, Binbin Zheng, Mark Warschauer Chin-Hsi Lin, Chi Chang published "Learning in One-to-One Laptop Environments" in the Review of Educational Research. They reviewed "65 journal articles and 31 doctoral dissertations published from January 2001 to May 2015" to try to answer whether laptops are effective at improving learning.

In short, the answer is yes.  From the paper:

The most common changes noted in the reviewed studies include significantly increased academic achievement in science, writing, math, and English; increased technology use for varied learning purposes; more student-centered, individualized, and project-based instruction; enhanced engagement and enthusiasm among students; and improved teacher–student and home–school relationships.

This research should encourage proponents of thoughtful technological innovation in the classroom that their efforts have wide-ranging and important positive effects.

 

Talky for Video Chats

I've had the opportunity to meet with educators (in other schools and other roles in the field) digitally this year.  Today, I tried Talky for my video conference.  It was the easiest of all the methods I tried so far.  Both parties need Chrome and earbuds with a mic.  That's it.  Pick the camera that is forward facing before you start the call. https://talky.io/

A Padlet workflow for multiple classes

Many teachers are using Padlet in their classes to do some quick collaboration. Using Padlet, students can quickly and easily respond to each others work, post questions or make comments.  Teachers can use Padlet to quickly conduct formative assessments.

But if you've got two or three of the same class, it can become a nightmare to create two or three different Padlets for those classes.

Here's a workflow to help make the job easier using the "remake" button in the top right corner of Padlet. It's pretty easy, but there are a few details you should be sure not to miss.

How to add a countdown timer to your google slides

For some activities, especially those that require switching roles or moving around the room at certain intervals, a countdown timer can be really useful.

Here's how to add a timer to your google slides.