Yes, you can have it all 🍰. Save your time AND help students drive their own learning with these 5 research-backed feedback strategies:
1. Worked Examples
Using worked examples helps students get actionable information faster. This feedback helps students understand your expectations when they’re assessing themselves or even before they start working. Usually we provide rubrics to students, but students (and adults) often don’t understand how to use rubrics to assess their own learning. It’s much more effective to show what exemplar work looks like instead of trying to explain in words.
A few ways you can use worked examples in your class:
- Display a few exemplars from a previous year along with comments for why you chose them
- Collect a few exemplars after an initial attempt of an assignment. Discuss them with the class to describe what makes them exemplary. Provide this list and worked examples to allow students to revise.
- Create an exemplar while students are working. By the end of the class, students know you’re working alongside them and they have your exemplar to refer to.
Worked examples are important for students to engage with the assignment criteria and results in higher-quality work from the get-go, saving you valuable time down the road.
2. Peer Feedback
Peer feedback is not only about letting students do the work (instead of you 😉). Peer feedback helps the student giving feedback more than receiver (Lundstrom & Baker, 2009) because they’re engaging with the criteria by looking at work samples (see above). Thus, peer feedback is an important strategy for student learning, while also establishing the teacher as a facilitator rather than the single authority who must spend evenings and weekends grading and giving feedback on papers or homework.
Tip: focus peer review on a single criteria. Learn more from this Floop blog post “Writing Strong Criteria for Peer Review” about distilling assignments down to smaller, bite-sized tasks so students are focused on mastering one skill at a time.
With Floop, you can make any assignment into a peer review activity for students.
3. Self Assessment – Before or During
Before or during a lesson or unit, try the “Feedback Requests” strategy: ask students to choose one specific criterion for which they’d like feedback from you. It’s faster for the teacher/facilitator to answer a specific question, and students are more receptive to the feedback since they made the request!
Another mid-lesson strategy is to have students do a self-evaluation, then a peer review, and THEN give teacher directed feedback on just one area. You could try the green / yellow / red light system described HERE, that gives you quick visual cues that will help you be able to offer pointed and relevant feedback (quickly) to every student.
4. Self Grading – After
Have students evaluate themselves based on an agreed upon scoring guide or rubric, then mark only points of disagreement to discuss with the student. You can use the self-assessment templates for this post lesson/unit self grading as well as during the lesson (described above).
5. No Corrections
Instead of correcting work yourself, delegate corrections to students and their peers. Give them the answer key to check their work, or you can also make it fun with the “Stamp as you go,” strategy, where after being the initial corrector, you pass the power along to your students.
If you are doing the correcting, instead of providing the right answers, try just Highlighting Mistakes and then allow your students to revise their work.
____
With all of these strategies continue to ask yourself this question: Who is doing the thinking? Consider writing it on a post-it and place in a prominent location or add it to your computer desktop or smartphone wallpaper. It’s a good one to remember 💛, because the more you can delegate to your students, the more your students will be doing the thinking (and learning!) while saving you time to focus on the things that matter the most in your classroom.
Lundstrom, K., & Baker, W. (2009). To give is better than to receive: The benefits of peer review to the reviewer’s own writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 18(1), 30–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2008.06.002
