Giving Feedback That Isn't Consigned to the Bottom of the Backpack

In this Tang Institute article, Bowman Dickson and Andy Housiaux describe every teacher’s least-favorite scenario: after spending hours reading students’ papers, correcting errors, and writing comments, students glance briefly at the grade, compare what they got with a few classmates, and continue to make the same mistakes on the next assignment. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” say Dickson and Housiaux, and provide a synthesis of the academic research on feedback that actually works. 

They start with Grant Wiggins’s definition: Feedback is information about how we are doing that guides our efforts to reach a goal. “It can come from others, oneself, or even the task itself,” say Dickson and Housiaux. “It aims to improve subsequent efforts and not just correct work that has already been done.” They give several examples of feedback containing evaluation, advice, and praise, each followed by teacher feedback that’s far more likely to improve students’ work: 

• Ineffective: B+ You still need to master exponent rules. 
• Better: You are confusing the two main exponent rules – when multiplying two bases you need to add the exponent, not multiply. Practice a few of these types of problems for the next homework assignment. 
• Ineffective: Make sure your main idea paragraph relates to your topic. 
• Better: Your first sentence is about therapy dogs, but the rest of your paragraph talks about what dogs eat and where dogs sleep. Look at the examples of effective writing on your handout and then rewrite the paragraph. 
• Ineffective: Wow! Your lab report is really nicely done. 
• Better: You explained your results with good scientific nuance, your methods section is appropriately detailed, and your data presentation is just as polished as the sample lab reports.

 “Feedback that is delivered effectively,” say Dickson and Housiaux, “will advance student learning in ways that even the most well-intentioned evaluation, advice, and praise simply cannot.” They boil down the research on effective feedback to four big ideas: 

• Big idea #1: Students must engage with feedback in order to learn from it. “Feedback should cause thinking,” says British assessment guru Dylan Wiliam. “Feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor.” This means reserving classroom time for students to process the teacher’s comments (often posed as questions or hints) and engage with a brief follow-up task – which might be correcting an error or writing about what they learned from the comments, what they did well, and what they will do differently next time. Students need to learn how to be “feedback seekers,” looking for it, taking it in, and following up. 
• Big idea #2: Relationships matter. Establishing trust is an essential precursor; then the teacher can be a “warm demander,” setting high expectations and conveying feedback with growth-mindset language that speaks to students’ work, not their identity. Without a trusting relationship, teachers’ power position, along with their gender, race, or other characteristics, can trigger stereotype threat in students. “Don’t withhold criticism or overpraise mediocre work,” say Dickson and Housiaux. And create a classroom culture in which mistakes are seen as an important part of learning. 
• Big idea #3: Focus on specific instructional goals. “If students do not understand where they are aiming, they will not be able to make sense of the feedback they receive on their performance,” say Dickson and Housiaux. That’s why it’s vital to be transparent about learning outcomes and assessment criteria, and provide exemplars of student work at different levels of proficiency. The teacher’s goal is to build skills and habits of mind that will help students think differently and get better. “Feedback should change the way students think and engage with future material,” say the authors, “instead of just fixing mistakes on past work.” To that end, less is more; feedback should target only a few key areas. 
• Big idea #4: Separate feedback from grading. Giving grades is a requirement in almost all schools, but teachers should be under no illusions that grades improve performance. The challenge is getting students less focused on grades and more on continuous improvement. “Teachers can encourage students to focus more on the feedback they receive by spending time explaining the difference between feedback and grades,” say Dickson and Housiaux, “and then showing the ways in which students can improve by attending carefully to the teacher’s feedback.” Teachers also need to nudge students toward autonomy and independence, providing opportunities for and instruction in self-assessment and peer feedback versus constant dependence on teachers. 

At the end of their paper, Dickson and Housiaux include six case studies showing how these big ideas play out in classrooms – a student demanding to know why a classmate got a better grade; students not improving despite copious written feedback on their work; a teacher’s comment taken the wrong way by a student; a student not doing homework and failing to ask for help. Each case is followed by focusing questions on what might change a frustrating situation. 

 “Feedback in Practice: Research for Teachers” by Bowman Dickson and Andy Housiaux, Tang Institute at Andover, August 2021; Housiaux can be reached at ahousiaux@andover.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #907 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

How School Librarians Can Maximize Their Impact in Unsettled Times

        In this article in Knowledge Quest, Kristin Fontichiaro (University of Michigan) and Wendy Steadman Stephens (Jacksonville State University) suggest 40 ways that school librarians can maximize learning in a time of uncertainty. A selection: 

• Realize your leadership potential – what Ewan McIntosh describes as “agile, whole-school interdisciplinary work that is needed to create the exceptional learning experience our young people deserve.”
• Define success by the impact you make, not by how busy you are, leaning into the influential, urgent, critical tasks in your building role. 
• Replenish your “surge capacity” by carving out time to connect with others, exercising, practicing hobbies, and living your faith. 
• Retool your website so it works for students who are learning remotely. 
• “Go spelunking” into a database to find advanced features, tuning into webinars, and updating assignments with new tools. 
• Reconsider punitive overdue policies – for example, letting items auto-renew, permitting students to renew on their own, and ending fines. 
• Adapt online lessons for offline students, partnering with special educators to keep lessons accessible for students with learning differences. 
• Do a diversity audit of your collection and adapt selection criteria to reflect the richness of a global society and a multicultural community. 
• Remember that parents are watching, with some ready to pounce on cultural differences between home and school; anticipate these conflicts and mediate a new level of family involvement in the curriculum. 
• Consider taking on the role of supporting families as they master virtual connections with the school. 
• Tune in to school board and public library meetings. 
• Teach students how to explore multiple perspectives on the news, including Freedom Forum’s collection of front pages. 
• Curate e-books available to students at home, creating “bookshelves” of hand-picked titles.
• Explore how you will address widespread misinformation and disinformation – for example, by using Rand Corporation’s Media Literacy Standards to Counter Truth Decay.
• Explore and share Google Scholar, a powerful search tool to find scholarly papers. 
• Evaluate your media diet and that of your school with tools like Ad Fontes Media and AllSides.
• Build in some time for students to wonder, using digital resources like livecams or remote locales, Google Arts and Culture, and digitized museum collections. 
• Do one thing you’ve put off. “You’ll feel relief and accomplishment,” say Fontichiaro and Steadman. 

 “Pushing Forward While Treading Water” by Kristin Fontichiaro and Wendy Steadman Stephens in Knowledge Quest, September/October 2021 (Vol. 50, #1, pp. 42-48); the authors can be reached at font@umich.edu and wstephens@jsu.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #905 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

A Tribute to Roland Barth by Kim Marshall

        My friend and mentor Roland Barth died on Sunday at 84. Throughout his storied career as a teacher, principal, writer, and developer of school leaders, Roland was foursquare for quality, equity, shared leadership, humor, and great metaphors. Here are a few quotes (see Memos 127 and 504 for summaries of two of his articles): 

         “The nature of relationships among the adults within a school has a greater influence on the character and quality of that school and on student accomplishment than anything else. If the relationships between administrators and teachers are trusting, generous, helpful, and cooperative, then the relationships between teachers and students, between students and students, and between teachers and parents are likely to be trusting, generous, helpful, and cooperative. If, on the other hand, relationships between administrators and teachers are fearful, competitive, suspicious, and corrosive, then these qualities will disseminate throughout the school community.” 

         “A precondition for doing anything to strengthen our practice and improve a school is the existence of a collegial culture in which professionals talk about practice, share their craft knowledge, and observe and root for the success of one another. Without these in place, no meaningful improvement – no staff or curriculum development, no teacher leadership, no student appraisal, no team teaching, no parent involvement, and no sustained change – is possible.” 

         “For a long time, people have realized that the principal alone can’t run something as complex and enormous as a school. But now I think principals realize that.” “In many respects, principals do not possess power until they share it.” 

         “What the principal needs is helpful, nonjudgmental, nonpunitive assistance in sorting out, reflecting upon, and sharpening professional practice. Unfortunately, what most principals find is at best benign neglect, at worst inservice training.” 

         “If all teachers are expected to be leaders, no one is breaking the taboo about standing higher than the others because everyone is on the same higher level… The shift comes when you also take a piece of leading the school. There’s tremendous satisfaction that comes from making that jump, to being an owner rather than a renter here.” 

         “The primary problem with public education is not that teachers and principals aren’t doing their jobs. The problem is that they are frequently under pressure to behave in ways dictated by others…”

         “From the teacher’s standpoint, a resentful parent can make a school year a torment. As one teacher put it, ‘It’s a little like driving down the turnpike with a hornet in the car. It’s only one hornet, but it can sure interfere with where you’re trying to go, getting there, and how you feel about the trip!’ If Ms. Smith is trying to educate children while some of their parents are persistently trying to educate her, she has her hands full.” 

         “Many parents control the hour at which a child goes to bed at night, but much as they might like to, these parents cannot control the hour that a child goes to sleep. Similarly, we in the schools can control to some extent what is taught, but we cannot ensure what is learned.” 

         “Rather than viewing differences among children and teachers as problems to be solved, I have explored the flip side of the coin. I have tried to find ways in which differences can be turned to educational advantage and enlisted in the service of personal and intellectual growth for those within the school.” 

         “The teacher who can intelligently appraise what children are doing today can prepare an effective lesson tomorrow.” 

         “Good education is neither gerbils nor workbooks; it is not externally prescribed behavior for teacher or student. Rather, good education is rooted in a teacher’s personal belief about how children learn best. Good education grows in a situation where the teacher’s behavior is a response to first-hand observations of children’s behavior. Thus, good education necessarily varies from classroom to classroom, teacher to teacher, year to year.” 

         “Leadership is attempting to hold the flood of daily administrivia – forms to fill out, meetings to attend, reports to submit – at arm’s length so that other important issues like staff organization, placement, evaluation of students, and staff development can be closely addressed.” 

         “Selective risk taking is somewhat like working on an old car. I once asked a neighbor who was helping me rebuild the engine of a Model A Ford how much I should tighten a head nut. ‘Stop a quarter of a turn before you strip it,’ he said. I think that is an apt way to think about school administration. I stop a quarter of a turn before I strip the organizational nut.” 

         “My objective is for all of us to come to school each September with at least one significant new element in our professional (and therefore personal) lives – something to dream about, think about, worry about, get excited about, be afraid about, lose sleep about, become and remain alive about.”

Please Note: This tribute is reprinted with permission from issue #902 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

An Invitation to Brave Space

Together we will create brave space

because there is no such thing as a "safe space" --

We exist in the real world

We all carry scars

And we have all caused wounds.

In this space

We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world, 

We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,

We call each other to more truth and love

We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.

We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.

We will not be perfect.

This space will not be perfect.

It will not always be what we wish it to be

But

It will be our brave space together 

and

We will work on it side by side.

            by Micky ScottBey Jones

James Baldwin on American History

 American history is 

longer, larger, more

various, more beautiful,

and more terrible than

anything anyone has

ever said about it.

James Baldwin

What Kinds of Mathematics Do Students Need for the Real World?

        In this article in Mathematics Teacher: Learning & Teaching PK-12, Jo Boaler, Tanya LaMar, and Cathy Williams (Stanford University) report on a project that started with a phone call Boaler received from Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame. Levitt had been helping his own children with their high-school mathematics homework and was struck by what he considered the antiquated nature of the work they were doing. Very little of it, he said, was the kind of math that he used in his professional and personal life. 

         To check this perception with a wider group, Levitt and his colleagues at the University of Chicago did a survey of visitors to the Freakonomics website asking what kinds of math they used on a daily basis, and 913 people responded. Boaler, LaMar, and Williams saw the results and noticed that almost 3/4 of the respondents were men, so they asked the same questions of education leaders; 427 responded, mostly women. Strikingly, the responses from the two groups were quite similar. Here are the percentages in each group saying they used each kind of mathematics “daily”: 

                                                   Freakonomics                  Educators 

- Use Excel/Google sheets                66                                56 

- Access and use databases                42                               37 

- Analyze and interpret data              31                                21 

- Visual data                                      23                                12 

- Algebra                                           11                                  4 

- Geometry                                         4                                   0 

- Calculus                                           2                                   1

- Trigonometry                                   2                                   0 

The percentages who said they “never” used algebra, geometry, calculus, and trigonometry were 28, 50, 70, and 79 respectively for the Freakonomics group and 41, 59, 71, and 82 for the educators. 

        Clearly these adults don’t use much of the math they learned in school – but they do make heavy use of data knowledge and tools. “For generations,” say Boaler, LaMar, and Williams, “high schools in the United States have focused on one course as the ultimate, college-attractive, and high-level course – calculus. This has led to a heavy focus on algebraic content in the earlier years even though a tiny proportion of students in the school system take calculus. When students do take calculus, it is often taken after rushing through years of content without the development of deep understanding.” And most students who take calculus in high school end up repeating it in college, or taking a lower-level course.

        The Common Core standards put more emphasis on data and statistics – but not enough, say the authors, which is why some states, including California, are beefing up data literacy in their curriculum standards. In that spirit, the Stanford and University of Chicago teams joined with colleagues around the world and spent 18 months thinking through what needs to change. “It quickly became clear,” say Boaler, LaMar, and Williams, “that all students – starting from the youngest in prekindergarten to those in college – need to learn the mathematics that will help them develop data literacy, to make sense of the data-filled world in which we all live… Whatever job your students go into, they will be making sense of data… Data awareness and data literacy are needed to not only be an effective employee but also function in the modern world… If we do not help students become data literate, they will be vulnerable to people who are misrepresenting issues and data.” 

        This line of thinking has spawned an initiative called YouCubed; the website has had more than 51 million visitors so far. It includes a series of “data talks,” which show students a data representation and ask, What do you notice? and What do you wonder? Among the topics: basketball, endangered species, popular dogs, and data ethics. Here’s an example of a middle-school data talk (see the article link below for more). Naturally, Boaler, LaMar, and Williams advocate a K-12 curriculum with an alternative pathway focused on data science and statistics. “Research suggests that the content of such a pathway is much more engaging for broader groups of students,” they say, “providing more-equitable participation in higher-level courses.” 

 “Making Sense of a Data-Filled World” by Jo Boaler, Tanya LaMar, and Cathy Williams in Mathematics Teacher: Learning & Teaching PK-12, July 2021 (Vol. 114, #7, pp. 508-517); the authors can be reached at joboaler@stanford.edu, tlamar@stanford.edu, and cathyw11@stanford.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #897 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

How Effective is Orton-Gillingham?

        In this article in Exceptional Children, Elizabeth Stevens (Georgia State University), Clint Moore, Nancy Scammacca, Alexis Boucher, and Sharon Vaughn (University of Texas/Austin), and Christy Austin (University of Utah) report on their meta-analysis of 16 studies of Orton-Gillingham, a popular and widely used approach to reading instruction. Orton- Gillingham is described as a “direct, explicit, multisensory, structured, sequential, diagnostic, and prescriptive” method for teaching children with (or at risk for) word-level reading disabilities, including dyslexia. 

        The researchers’ conclusion: although the mean effect size (0.22) was positive and somewhat promising, Orton-Gillingham did not substantially improve children’s phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, spelling, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. “Despite the continued widespread acceptance, use, and support for Orton-Gillingham instruction,” conclude Stevens et al., “there is little evidence to date that these interventions significantly improve reading outcomes for students with or at risk for word-level reading disabilities over and above comparison group instruction.” 

        This finding certainly raises concerns about the fact that a number of states have adopted legislation mandating Orton-Gillingham. “More high-quality, rigorous research with larger samples of students with word-level reading disabilities,” say the authors, “is needed to fully understand the effects of Orton-Gillingham interventions on the reading outcomes of this population.” 

 “Current State of the Evidence: Examining the Effects of Orton-Gillingham Reading Interventions for Students with or at Risk for Word-Level Reading Disabilities” by Elizabeth Stevens, Christy Austin, Clint Moore, Nancy Scammacca, Alexis Boucher, and Sharon Vaughn in Exceptional Children, July 2021 (Vol. 87, #4, pp. 397-417); Stevens can be reached at estevens11@gsu.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #897 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.