In my second practicum, I focused heavily on formative assessment and feedback. Knowing that the students, statistically, would not look at the feedback if the mark was on the page, I chose to either give feedback in advance of the next writing activity, separate from handing back the assignment that generated the feedback, or after the assignment had been handed back the day before. In both instances, the feedback was attached to their next assignment, which we were doing in class that day. The first assignment that generated formative feedback was an essay that focused on three things that the students’ valued, from their pets to their friends to any objects they owned. An anonymous example of my formative feedback can be found below:

I love your introduction and your way with words in it. There’s only one things missing from it: your topic sentence. While you mention that there are things that you value in the introduction, you don’t get specific and actually list the three things.

The purpose of the topic sentence is to make it very clear what you’re setting out to do with your body.

For example, with the “Three Things You Value” assignment, you would write… “The three things I value the most are xxxx, yyyyy, and zzzzz.”

I think in general your writing is cohesive and solid. Once in a while, there is a sentence that I think could be said more simply or more clearly.

Moving forward, I want you to reflect on how you say things. When rereading your work, ask yourself, “Did I say this the clearest it could have been said? Are there any extraneous words that could be cut out? Is there a more concise (short and clear) way of saying this?” 

That is what I would love to see in your next piece of writing for me. Thank you very much for your efforts.

P.S. Please make the small corrections I asked for in your Three Things report and hand it back to me so I can give you a mark.

As you can see, I began with positive feedback, and then I targeted things that were missing from the assignment as well. The student did not add the topic sentence and did not choose to resubmit. I followed my coaching teacher’s policy of taking anything corrected and improved and remarking it. I had a few students who resubmitted their work to me, but overall, not many did so.

On the next writing assignment, however, I checked to make sure that my feedback was responded to, and it was. This was the slip of paper that I stapled to the final report assignment that was attached to the group youtube project.

Prior Feedback:

In your last feedback, I asked you to focus on how you say things in order to get more clarity in your writing.

Progress Report 1:

Thank you for the complex sentences. Your writing has improved in clarity compared to your last piece. Thank you for showing me evidence of your growth.

Tool Assignment: Thank you for using complex sentences. Please review commas with regards to conjunctions. I feel that you have improved your writing with this submission.

Progress Report 2: This is lacking in detail. There’s not a lot of sentence variety. It’s also too short.

Next steps: Please write with more consistency between your assignments. In some of your work, I see evidence of careful thought and excellent writing, and I other submissions I will see less of that. Consistency is key.

I am a firm believer in using formative feedback to grow the student’s skills, so I took hours out of my weekends to do this feedback for the students. Most of them responded in some capacity to my feedback, but a few submitted most of their work too late to get feedback or did not respond to it in their final submissions to me. This negatively impacted their growth, and therefore, their grade. As I gave them plenty of notice in advance and clearly instructed them to respond to my feedback with this final writing piece, I feel that I gave them sufficient time and warning that evidence of their growth would be part of their grade for this assignment.

On the project side of these writing assignments, I decided to use a rubric and clear criteria and instructions to ensure that the students would meet the expectations of the assignment. I also built self assessment into their final grade. We talked through the project together as we decided their final grade. Because I did this, I was able to learn and assess things about their process that were not evident in their final product. For example, one student who appeared to not be doing much planning or work in class was delayed by her peer taking too long to cook the food that this student was going to critique in her youtube video. She was able to explain to me with this kind of assessment model the work that actually went into her last minute recording. For example, she dressed the same, had the same lighting, made sure the camera was in the exact same spot, and wore the same clothes to make it seem as though she did all the filming in one day. In actual fact, she filmed across three different days. Without this discussion as part of her assessment, I would never have known about this attention to detail and preparation, and I would have given her a poor mark for her planning. As such, I feel this assessment model I chose for this project did its job much better than me just watching their final product and excluding the preparation and work from the grading process.

Below you will find the supporting documents for this project as well as the rubric.