This semester, I am working to improve my written feedback practices. I have just under 30 students in a second-year course that is “writing-intensive,” i.e., designed to improve their academic writing skills. This means that nearly every week, students are completing a short writing assignment, and nearly every week, I have the opportunity to offer them feedback.

Everyone’s heard something about feedback strategies like “two stars and a wish” or the “good-bad-good sandwich.” Advice like this reminds us to balance positive reinforcement with corrective remarks, and to limit the number of suggestions we make so that students can actually act on them.

While I am always striving to give my students great feedback comments, this semester I am taking a step back to look at how I can use feedback to develop my students’ self-regulated learning.

After finishing an assignment, no student is an empty vessel waiting to receive feedback from their instructor. They already have plenty of ideas about what was hard and what was easy; what they did well and what they did poorly; and why that was the case. Just stand outside a classroom where an exam has just finished and you’ll hear plenty of conversations around self-regulated learning.

My goal is to provide written feedback that helps students have these conversations with themselves. I intend to do this in the context of their writing assignments by writing comments that show my students “how a reader (the teacher) experienced the essay as it was read (i.e. playing back to the student how the essay worked)” (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick 2006, 209). This mode—really, a mindset—of writing comments on essays can, if successful, reveal to students the conscious or unconscious choices that have impacted their writing. The end result, hopefully, would give students concrete, actionable ways “to reduce the discrepancy between their intentions and the resulting effects” of their writing (ibid., 208).

What this kind of feedback looks like in practice, I am still working out. However, I know that it will NOT look like this:

Scary comments on an essay

Checkmarks, squiggles, underlines, questionmarks, laconic comments. I dreaded the “OK” comment! Was it an “ok… but” or an “ok, great!” or an “ok, just barely acceptable”? But sometimes, it is good to work from a negative model as well as a positive one.

Specifically, here are some components I am trying to incorporate into my written feedback:

• Signpost comments: “at this point in the essay, I am expecting you to [do this]”; “above, you said this… so I hope that here you will [do this]…”
• Clear, unambiguous notations: make a clear distinction between positive and negative aspects of the reader’s experience
• A non-authoritative tone: helps to cultivate in students a sense of their readers’ experience, not their teachers’ experience
• Reading for intentions: it is not always apparent what a writer actually wants to accomplish; its an instructor’s goal to help them find that intention and accomplish it.

With respect to this last component, reading for intention, I found a lot of success by following a recommendation from Carolyn Samuel, who is a part of the Teaching and Learning community at McGill University. In the last assignment, I asked students to self-annotate their writing by underlining their thesis statements before submission. This encourages students to enter into dialogue with themselves about their intentions in writing, before receiving any feedback from the instructor.

I am also planning to ask my students to offer feedback on MY feedback at the midway point of the term (yikes, that’s VERY soon). I will follow-up with a midterm post that includes their thoughts.

Notes:

Nicol, D. J. and Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006), “Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice,” Studies in Higher Education 31(2): 199-218. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572090

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Happy New Year!

A new year brings a new semester, and a new semester brings brand-new students and courses. I often feel like the last semester ended just as students were beginning to feel really comfortable in the space of the classroom and with each other. Despite the usual end-of-semester stresses, my students were smiling. They were engaging with one another. They were making jokes. More than volunteering answers to my questions, they were posing questions to each other. If only every class had the same level of engagement as those classes in the last few weeks of the term!

Now, however, we have to press rewind. (Unless you teach full-year courses, in which case I don’t know if I should feel envy.) It’s the first day of school all over again. Students have to find their legs in a brand new course, and as instructors we have to help them. This year, I’m committing to foster better group dynamics in my classrooms, sooner. That’s why I thought carefully about the first day of class—because it’s the first day not only for my students, but also for me.

How do you teach the first day of a new course? More specifically, how do you teach the first day of a new course in order to accelerate group dynamics? These changes would eventually occur after the same group of people has been meeting together once or twice every week for two months, but how can we get to that good group feeling, earlier?

I can tell you how some first days are taught. The instructor reviews the syllabus, going over the textbook—yes, I know it’s not in the university bookstore yet, but they said they’re working on it—the weekly assignments, the schedule of exams, and major projects or papers. A few sneaky typos from the previous iteration of the syllabus are corrected—no need to fret. Are there any questions? Okay then. Class is dismissed early.

This is the first day of class as held in many large courses and also in smaller, discussion-based seminars. Logistically, this first day makes sense. Students will only be successful if they know the requirements for achieving success in the course. Since as a student I never once read a syllabus from front to back, I would assume that my students don’t do that either. Covering that critical information during class time can seem necessary.

However, this semester I did not address the syllabus at all. Since I lead the weekly small-group discussions of a larger course of approximately 100 students, the lead instructor had that particular honour. I also avoided the routine round-table introductions so common to discussion-based classes, tutorials, and seminars. (Hi, my name is Jacob. I study History. I’m in the 2^nd year of my PhD. I took this class because…) Only time will tell if this first day achieved its goals. Here is what I did.

(Disclaimer: my classes usually have 15-20 students. Small size is definitely a luxury in lesson-planning.)

1. Icebreaker. Groan, right? Well, I think my students actually had fun with this one. I skipped introductions entirely and divided the students into small groups. Using the whiteboards in the classroom, students first wrote their name on the board, and then had to quickly draw clues that would help their teammates guess the answer to the prompting questions. I wrote up a list of fifteen questions, some of which were basic introductory boilerplate (favorite food; favorite hobby) and some of which were a little more “out there” (if you could be an animal, which would you be?), and pinned several copies to the board. Each student only had two minutes to draw, and couldn’t talk or write any words! If this sounds like Pictionary, that’s because it is. Someone did actually make it through the whole list in only two minutes! Judging by the laughter I heard, I think this icebreaker was successful.

Icebreakers are most important because they reduce the stress and discomfort of playing the role of a stranger around strangers. In small, discussion-based classes it’s particularly critical that the participants feel comfortable. My goal with this icebreaker was to use small groups first as a launching pads for the launch group, and to remove the barrier to “silliness” that can stultify group dynamics. In fact, sometimes the silliest icebreakers are the best.

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After the icebreaker, I took attendance in the old-fashioned way. I still don’t know my students names, and addressing them by name is for me the best way to learn them. I briefly explained the format and rationale of these “tutorials,” as we call them: small group discussions that are intended to allow students to explore topics in more depth than might be covered during lecture. At this point I also allowed a pause for any general questions about the course.

With the “purpose” of the class now in mind, I moved on to the next activity.

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2. Goal-setting. Courses are designed to achieve specific learning objectives, but they can lead to unspecified learning outcomes for students as well. With this activity, I hoped to facilitate those learning outcomes. I asked students to take a few minutes to think about what they hope to learn from this course. Are they looking for specific content knowledge? To get more practice or help improving a particular skill? To have more opportunities to do something that they feel they excel at? The students wrote their thoughts on index cards that I collected at the end of class.

I didn’t share these goals with the class. This was a private, individual activity. Instead, I took the goals cards home with me and reviewed them. For my own reference, I made notes about common themes among the cards and the goals of each student. In a future class, midway through the term, I will return these goals cards to the students and ask them to check-in with themselves. Have we made any progress towards their goal? If yes, that’s great: positive reinforcement. If not, what can I do as an instructor to help?

This has potential benefit for learners and for instructors. It is another way to be accountable for students’ learning beyond their grades. I haven’t ever tried this before, so I will be interested in my students’ responses later in the term.

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3. Collaborative classroom agreement. I asked the students to reflect on what that they need to happen, or not to happen, in the classroom to help them reach their goal. Each student wrote their thoughts on the back of their card.

I designated a space on the whiteboard by writing “Classroom Agreement.” I asked the students to volunteer some of what they had written, in order to collaboratively generate an agreement for the kind of space that we would cultivate in the classroom. I wrote their thoughts on the board.

As I wrote, it became important to ask students for more detail. What does a “respectful environment” look like? Why is being respectful important for learning? How can we show that we are being respectful? While I provided these prompts, I left the answers up to the students. I noted them on the board. We had a small discussion about each point as it went up on the board, and I offered lots of space for students to ask clarifying questions or voice concerns.

The classroom agreement made by one of my classes

As it turned out, both of my classes built very similar agreements. In fact, I would have been more surprised if they were radically different. But if half of this activity’s value lies in the literal agreement itself, the other half is in the process of actually doing the activity. The goal of this activity is to verbalize what we take for granted, and to give students ownership of the classroom and their behavior.

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By this point, we had almost reached the end of a 50-minute class period. These activities can take quite some time, but in fact I spent very little time talking! At the end of class, I allowed some more empty time for students to ask those logistical questions about the course that hadn’t been addressed yet.

Only time will tell if this first day has set up these classes for success, but I’m looking forward to seeing how they develop.