As regular Radical readers know, I’ve been tinkering with student-involved assessment practices over the past several years. My goal is to turn feedback into detective work — a concept that assessment expert Dylan Wiliam argues is essential to producing the kinds of self-reliant, reflective learners that will succeed in an increasingly complex work world.
To push that kind of work forward in my room, I’m thinking about building on John Hattie’s assertion in Visible Learning (2009) that the best feedback helps students to answer three questions: “Where am I going? (learning intentions/goals/success criteria), How am I going? (self assessment and self evaluation), and Where to next? (progression/new goals)” (Kindle Location 3995).
So I’ve developed several versions of what I’m calling a “Where am I Going Reflection Sheet.” Check them out here:
Where am I Going Reflection Sheet
My plan is to ask students to return to this reflection sheet several times over the course of a unit to think carefully about the ongoing expectations for classroom lessons and the evidence that they can collect to prove that they are mastering essential content and/or skills. The goal is to help students realize that setting goals, monitoring progress, and identifying areas for continued improvement are natural steps taken by learners.
Some of the templates that I’ve developed are explicit, defining the essential outcomes, sources of evidence, and strategies for moving forward in advance. Others are less explicit, requiring students to demonstrate a greater grasp of the expectations and opportunities in each sequence of instruction. My guess is that I’d use these templates to differentiate instruction in my classroom, handing out the explicit templates to students who struggle to set their own direction and monitor their own progress towards mastering essential content.
Does any of this make sense to all y’all? More importantly, does this seem like a practice worth pursuing? What changes would you make to the templates that I’ve created?
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Related Radical Reads:
Peer Feedback Should Start with Observations, not Evaluations
