Recap #msMathChat 7/28/14

I attended my first #msmathchat today, though without a twitter handle, I was just "listening." It was a flood of ideas and resources, and the hour flew by! Today's focus was "getting our students to talk and justify their thoughts."

Here were the highlights for me:

@cmmteach described how she does a post-it debate

"Pose a question, ask for answers. All answers go on board. Students get post-it. Explain why they choose the answer they did. I collect and put into columns under answers while getting an idea of who said what. Then someone from each group has to try to convince others to switch answer to theirs. Kids can come change post it whenever. Then discuss what was it that made them change their mind. Then someone who changed explains concept again to those still need convincing."

I love this idea. Students persuading each other to change their minds (or not) is at the heart of MP3. And then the actual getting up and moving of the post-it provides a concrete action to go with the discussion. Even though I will have students primarily working in pairs (at least at the beginning of the year), I could pair pairs so that students would have a slightly larger group to discuss with. 

@MathButler has students work in groups to do error analysis of diagrams, equation solution processes, etc. He also recommended @lisabej_manitou's Always, Sometimes, Never Activity
 These are two activities that I already do a version of. However, I have never done them in a partner or group setting, and I absolutely think that the format for each of these activity would spark discussion.

@Kidsmathtalk offered up some critical thinking posters with questions and sentence stems
@Jreulbach has "smart" questions at each table for students to ask each other 
At some point this summer, I do want to figure out what sentence frames I will teach my students to support both partner and full group talk. These are some good ones to start with.
 

@Sarah3martin offered up her conversation rubric and recommended Promoting Purposeful Discourse

4	3	2	1
- One person talks at a time - Everyone looking at the speaker - Everyone listening - Answering most questions - Telling why we agree or disagree  - Everyone shares ideas, thought, feelings	- One person talks at a time - Everyone looking at the speaker  - Everyone listening - Answering most questions - Telling why we agree or disagree - Everyone shares ideas, thought, feelings	- A few people listening - A few people looking at speaker - Few questions answered - Only some agrees or disagrees - A few people share	- Hardly anyone listening - Hardly anyone looking at speaker - Not everyone involved in talk - Questions left unanswered - Hardly any sharing Conversation stops

 As I am thinking about what I want group work to look like in my own classroom, this rubric also seems like a good place to start .

Incorporating Feedback – Part 2

So I know that I want to give meaningful feedback to my students and then have them revise their work based on the feedback (See Part 1). But what specifically will this feedback look like?

Examples:

Wiggins offers this example, with feedback in italics and then advice at the end.

“I found it very difficult to grasp your main point. At the start, it seemed that you were arguing against mining coal, but in paragraph three you focused on the need to provide healthcare to all workers. Next time, Sam, you’ll want to make your thesis clearer to the reader”

The feedback is the essential part, with the advice sometimes unnecessary. It is also possible to offer praise at the beginning, as long as it is followed by feedback.

“Nice job on the project, Sheshona! You answered the essential question in great depth, with lots of illustrative examples, and your oral presentation was polished and informative.”

The examples above are student-focused rather than work-focused, but could easily revised. Ex: "This paper deeply answers the essential equation with lots of illustrative examples, and the presentation was polished and informative.”

In his Role Reversal, Mark Barnes offers a framework for narrative feedback that he calls SE2R: Summarize, Explain, Redirect, Resubmit. Here’s an example:

Summarize: You have completed a how-to article and posted it to KidBlog. You highlighted words in the post in order to demonstrate understanding of the “Words that Pop” presentation.

Explain: The highlighted words are not words that make the writing “pop.” Also, we reviewed how to use commas after introductory words and phrase, yet you haven’t placed any commas by these words. For example, first, next, and then are all introductory words that should be followed by a comma.

Redirect: You should review the presentation on strong adjectives and verbs, linked under RAY on www.barnesclass.com. Then return to your how-to-blog and improve it, based on the presentation. Also, add the commas where needed.

Resubmit: When this is done, please go to the “Write to Mr. Barnes” section on our classroom website and tell me that you have resubmitted this activity. (74)

Within this framework, Barnes still highlights the goals (a how-to article with “Words that Pop” and correct comma usage), gives a description of what was done that doesn’t meet the goals, and offers next steps to meet the goals. Although he is not explicit about what “words that pop” are in the feedback, he directs the student to where he/she can find that information.

My Plan

So, where does this leave me? I think that I want to start on the more scaffolded end of my continuum (though there are arguments that giving students more autonomy early on will increase investment). 

So my narrative feedback will always have:

- a description of work in relation to the goals/criteria

 It may have:

- evaluative language

- Advice/Redirection

- brief praise at the beginning or end

- A statement of support (See Result 5 from Jo Boaler)

To help me give feedback more consistently and quickly, I wrote up some sentence frames that I can use. I imagine that this list will change/grow once the school year starts and I am actually writing feedback.

Category	Sentence Frames
Description of Work in Relation to the Goal(s)/Criteria Avoid “you” language	- “In doing {description}, this work does/does not {goal}” - “In doing {description}, this work does/does not demonstrate understanding of {main concept}” - “There are minor errors in {goal}, such as…” -“The work {description}, therefore {analysis of goal}. - “This work contains/includes…” - “This work does not contain/include…”
Evaluative Language Avoid “you” language	- “strongly/starts to” - “accurately/inaccurately” - “successfully/unsuccessfully”
Advice/Redirection Try to avoid but, however, instead of	- “The next thing to do is…” - “Revisit…” - “Continue to…” - “Do/do more/don’t do/do less” - “Try” - “Check the work/calculations/steps for…” - “The next step is…” - “In your revision, remember to…”
Brief Praise at Beginning or End	- “Nice job with…” - “Good work!”
A Statement of Support	- “I am giving you this feedback because I believe in you” - “Keep up the good work” - “Keep up the strong effort”

Based on my feedback, students should be able to answer the following questions:

- what goal(s) does the feedback reference?

- Does the work meet the goal? (more complex than yes/no, usually)

- what part of the work helped you get to the goal?

- what part of the work did not help you get to the goal?

- what are your next steps? (If different than given by teacher, why?)

Therefore, I have created the following sheet for my students to do revisions to their Math Thinking Record entries. They will complete them and staple them into their journals over their original entry.

Revision Template

For quizzes/tests/projects, I will give abbreviated feedback through standards based grading and offer brief additional comments/advice by standard.

Last thoughts (for now!): While eventually I would like to have students give each other feedback, that will wait until the middle of the year (or, if I’m realistic, perhaps next year). I want us to get in the groove of getting feedback and using it to repeatedly reach our goals first. After that, I can start to think about how to teach students to give good feedback.

Incorporating Feedback - Part 1

One thing that I want to incorporate more deeply into my teaching this year is feedback & revision. Here is my thinking so far:

What is feedback? 

Grant Wiggins defines feedback here as “information about how we are doing in our efforts to reach a goal.” Similarly, Developmental Designs describes “reinforcing language” as language that lets the student know what has been done that was successful. Feedback fosters independence in students because it empowers students to be able to determine what is successful/how to meet the goal and then do it. It is preferable to praise (ex: “Good job”) which forces students to rely on the teacher to know whether or not they have met the goal and is not replicable. It is also more effective than stand-alone advice (ex: “Try making a table”) which may seem like it comes out of nowhere as it is not explicitly related to the goal.

There is a debate about whether feedback is by nature evaluative (See here). More important to me is that after reading a piece of feedback, the student should be able to identify what they did that helped them reach the goal and what they did that didn’t help them reach the goal. They then should use this information to replicate or improve their performance. These next steps could be explicitly stated by me, but with good advice, students should be able to identify the next steps even if not explicitly stated.

It is also worth considering when a description of work (not in relation to an explicitly stated goal), has its merits. This could set students up to identify the goal for themselves (which may or may not match the teacher goal, depending on the framing of the project) and whether or not what they have done supports the goal.

This leads me to a continuum of feedback from most scaffolded to least scaffolded:

In general, if the next steps the student determines do not match the feedback, there are two main questions to consider:

- Is the student using a different way to get to the goal?

- Is the student prioritizing a different goal?

My Guiding Principles

As I think about using feedback in my class, I have decided on some guiding principles for myself:

1. Talk about the work/product, not the person. This reinforces growth mindset and generally people are more receptive to you critiquing their work and not themselves.
2. Less is more. Feedback should be focused and not overwhelming for the students. For narrative feedback, this would mean one, maximum two actionable steps for the students.
3. Feedback is most effective when students will have time to revise/respond to the feedback in class. Revision may eventually become hw, but this would be after there is a routine around and habit of using feedback for revision.
4. Timely feedback and revision is motivating for students. It is at the core idea of formative assessments (Of course, in an extreme feedback could be too prompt and not enable students to do their own analysis. But I think this is a good general rule). Therefore, I am going to have revision days once a week or once every two weeks, depending on how it goes.
5. Giving feedback on everything (both the teacher-time and class-time it would require) is unreasonable. Therefore, I will only give narrative feedback on entries in students’ Math Thinking Record journals. I will give feedback through SBG scores and brief comments on assessments (quizzes, tests, projects). Students will then revise, practice, and/or re-assess standards based on the feedback.