Being College and Career Ready (CCR) is not only referring to students learning academic content but also building employability skills to help students “find their fit” and identify their own pathways. These pathways will look different for every learner, but helping them to find their passion and preparing them for success is what true college and career readiness means. Being able to give and receive feedback are soft skills that are often overlooked and untrained, yet business leaders are looking for employees who have feedback skills.
The U.S. Department of Education calls the CCR Standards “one of the most powerful strategic levers of improvement to ensure that every student is held to high academic standards”(U.S. Department of Education). Most states have adopted a variation of these standards, many under the heading “21st Century Skills”. In reality, schools have taught courses such as life skills and home economics, that unofficially address similar standards, for many years. Some schools even offer counseling and success organizers to help students figure out their individual pathways (Wilka). Now, many states have standards that include skills such as being able to: communicate clearly and effectively, create and respond to a feedback loop when problem-solving, incorporate group input and feedback into the work, incorporate feedback effectively, accept and provide feedback in a constructive and considerate manner, and learn from mistakes and accept feedback.
The idea behind the standards is that teachers can focus on the higher-order skills, such as feedback, that students need to think critically, solve real-world problems, and be successful in the 21st century and beyond. To be able to emphasize useful feedback on student performance and embed this feedback into everyday learning. But how do we ensure students progress towards – and meet – these standards? Below are some ideas!
Planning Strategies:
- When writing a unit plan outline, create a KUD – know, understand, and do – chart and build feedback into your unit plan so that you can give feedback along the way. Create and set up checkpoints, pre-set questions, and assignments that you will give your students feedback on what you want them to know (facts, vocabulary, definitions, places, information), understand (essential truths, principles, and generalizations, big ideas of a discipline), and do (basic skills thinking skills, planning skills, use of verbs or phrases). This will ensure that both you and your students know what they need to do in order to improve and meet the goals of the unit.
- Foster active learning by allowing students to seek a deeper understanding of complex ideas, rather than by memorizing bits of information. This can be done by allowing time for thoughtful student-led dialogue through a Harkness-style discussion. This also allows for both verbal self and peer feedback, while building their critical thinking skills and improving their reading skills.
- Give students choice and agency by offering choice menus that can be used for single lessons, weeklong studies, chapters, and units. Give students a way to make decisions about what they will do in order to meet class requirements.
Feedback Strategies:
- Peer review – Peer feedback is not only about letting students do the work, but it also helps the student give feedback more than the receiver (Lundstrom) because they’re engaging with the criteria by looking at work samples. Although peer feedback does take some training and support at the beginning (Winstone, Chapter 8), it also establishes the teacher as a facilitator rather than the single authority who must spend evenings and weekends grading and giving feedback on papers or homework.
- Self-feedback – Building student self-assessment and self-feedback into your lessons and units is a win-win-win! It promotes student growth, builds a feedback culture, AND saves you time. (Winstone, Chapter 3) You can also allow students to self-assess their own work against work they completed in the past, and discuss this with their peers to add a level of peer feedback. Training in self-evaluation can increase the use of self-regulated learning strategies (Panadero, Jönsson, & Strijbos, 2016).
The highly sought-after CCR skill of feedback can be embedded into any content with any of the above strategies. Purposefully planning where, when, and how you will give your students feedback in a given unit or lesson is a great way to ensure that you follow through. Using a variety of feedback strategies that include peer and self-feedback will save you time and improve student feedback literacy and outcomes.
As teachers, we created Floop to help others give meaningful feedback faster so their students can develop skills including college and career readiness, social-emotional, and higher-order thinking. Floop helps build students’ lifelong feedback literacy – being able to give and receive feedback. Floop does this by improving the feedback loop with fast, reusable teacher feedback, guided peer review, and guided self-assessment. Try it free today!
Sources:
“College- and Career-Ready Standards.” U.S. Department of Education, https://www.ed.gov/k-12reforms/standards.
Lundstrom, Kristi, and Wendy Baker. “To Give Is Better than to Receive: The Benefits of Peer Review to the Reviewer’s Own Writing.” Journal of Second Language Writing, JAI, 2 Sept. 2008, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1060374308000313?via%3Dihub.
Wilka, Jen. “Listening to Beneficiaries: Student Feedback on College and Career Readiness.” The Center for Effective Philanthropy, 24 Jan. 2020, https://cep.org/listening-beneficiaries-student-feedback-college-career-readiness/.
Winstone, Naomi, and Carless, David. Designing Effective Feedback Processes in Higher Education: A Learning-Focused Approach. The United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis, 2019.