Learning Reflection

1.  Breaking down the success criteria into individual parts and teaching to that individual part allowed students to master each success criteria and then build on to each one. For Example: I will include a headline for a newspaper article. This was broken down into the purpose of the headline and different kinds of headlines that could be used. Once students have a good understanding of each part of the success criteria, they can then proceed with the assignment.  This also helps us to provide more specific, descriptive feedback to our students.

2.  Having students meet in pairs to discuss how they use success criteria is helpful because it gives them a chance to reflect on what they have learned. It is also helpful to us because it gives us insight into what they are understanding and what they still don’t understand.

3.  For Writing:  give students smaller assignments in order to provide more effective feedback, and for feedback sessions to take less time

4.  Provide feedback half way through the assignment

• feedback seems to be more effective with Level 1 & 2 students when providing it during the initial stages of their work

5.  Using collaboration with a Google Doc to work through a chunk of the success criteria, not only allowed the students to talk about their understanding of the success criteria, but also allowed the students to observe what other groups were thinking.  This also allowed us to quickly see which groups were on track, and which groups needed some more support.

6.  Providing students with opportunities to work collaboratively made them more comfortable to ask clarifying questions and to discuss their thinking.

7.  Students are more receptive to feedback on strengths and next steps from each other than we had initially anticipated.

8.  The feedback we provide, and the method we use to provide it needs to be different for our Level 1 & 2 students compared to our Level 3 & 4 students.  The feedback we are providing is effective for our Level 3 & 4 students, but not effective for our Level 1 & 2 students.