Day 14 of my 30-Day Blogging Challenge for teachers from teachthought.com

Here is the link to the site with the 30-day challenge. 

http://www.teachthought.com/teaching/reflective-teaching-30-day-blogging-challenge-teachers/

 

Day 14: What is feedback for learning, and how well do you give it to students?

Although this is not a tough question, I did a quick Google Search on "giving effective student feedback" just to see what would show up, and the most prevalent characteristic dealt with, "knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know." Reflecting on my last 10 years of teaching English, I think back to my first couple of years where the feedback I gave to my students was bland, generic and really did't help them as writers. At the time, I knew what good writing looked like, but just didn't know how to communicate that to my students in a language they would understand. 

My comments were usually something like: 

"Reword this" 

"Extend this idea" 

"What?"

or even worse, when I graded a piece of writing that was outstanding I would say:

"Great work" 

"Interesting" 

and would NOT focus on their style or voice. In fact, looking back I don't think I honestly knew HOW to give feedback based on the purpose of each assignment. 

Let's take this blog for example: 

One of the reasons I never created a blog before was because I was afraid of putting my thoughts into words, then putting it out there for the whole world to see. So I did some research and spoke to some other bloggers, and the best piece of advice I got was, 

think about your blog as a professional diary. You are not trying to win the Pulitzer Prize with every post, but rather put your thoughts and ideas out there for others to pull from. Yes, the writing is important, but more importantly, you are putting yourself out there and maybe inspiring someone else to take a chance on something new or possibly be inspired by something you say, regardless of your style or comma placement.

That statement really changed the way I looked at blogging. Yes, the writing and the style is important, but this is just another way to connect and start conversation,  engage with other teachers and get feedback. (So please feel free to comment...good or bad). 

I believe that this is the same way I give feedback to students (and teachers given my new job), based on the purpose of the piece.. Every piece of writing doesn't have to win the Pulitzer Prize and may have a missed comma or two; every lesson that I observe from a teacher doesn't have to be the one that wins them the Golden Apple, but more importantly is the intended message communicated and how can I help enhance their ideas not completely change them.