Meeting Notes from January 31

We shared what we are doing with feedback and how our students are responding.

Christine had her students give each other feedback on what they had done well during a presentation.  Each student in the class wrote the number of the criteria done well onto a post-it for each presenter.  Students then collated their feedback and reflected on what others felt they had done well.  Students felt good about this, and also realized which success criteria they needed to work on next.  Christine has posted pictures of this activity.

Mike and Peter have been working on using feedback in math.  They have each posted pictures of their student work and feedback.

Ben and Alvira have been working on using feedback and conferencing to improve students’ writing about Author’s Point of View.  Before each Author’s Point of View assignment, we have been providing whole class feedback, since many students needed the same thing.  With the whole class feedback, we also provided examples of how to apply that feedback, by either modeling that particular section of the success criteria or by writing a shared piece with the students.

As a group, we looked at the student samples from Alvira and Ben’s class to see how effective the written feedback and 1:1 conferencing was.  After comparing a first draft (of one student) to a second draft, which was done after a conference, we found that the students already achieving levels 3 and 4 improved and understood how to apply the feedback provided during the conference or on their success criteria checklist.  The students achieving at levels 1 and 2 improved very little or not at all after a 1:1 conference.  Written feedback for these students also does not seem to help them improve their work.

As a group we discussed what we need to do next in order for our level 1 and 2 students to improve.  We are going to try the following strategies

1.  Revise the Success Criteria to make it a little more like a checklist.

• also revise the criteria to include the specific feedback given to students
• don’t be afraid to revise the success criteria and hand out a new list to students
• We realized that the success criteria we started with did not include some of the specific points we were asking students to work on.  As we continue to look at the student work to see what they need, we better understand what the success criteria should look like.

2.  Create a graphic organizer that will guide the students through the success criteria when writing.

3.  Spend more small group time with the level 1 & 2 students to keep them on track–checking in on them after every few sentences (or every step) so that they have to revise immediately if they are off track.

We will also continue with our goals set last meeting:

1.  Choose 3-4 students that we will collect work samples from (take pictures of the work) so that we can see their progress.

2.  Work through the success criteria one [piece at a time.  This will help our weaker students to focus on learning one thing at a time, and hopefully be more successful.