If your school district is anything like mine, you have probably seen pretty dramatic changes in grading expectations over the last few months.
Teachers in our district, for example, are being encouraged to offer students meaningful and engaging feedback instead of grading assignments that our kids complete.
Those decisions are equity-based. If we grade work right now, students who have stable home lives, plenty of time to work on assignments, and support from parents who aren’t buried in their own work responsibilities — or trying to find work during an economic shutdown — will earn higher marks than their peers facing more challenging circumstances.
But what exactly does “meaningful and engaging feedback” look like?
As a guy who has written a ton about feedback over the years — including a book titled Creating a Culture of Feedback — I dig this quote from Dylan Wiliam.
Here’s why: “Turning feedback into detective work” is something that I can understand. It means the comments that I leave for kids have to force them to do additional thinking — about their own work, about the content that we are studying, about their pre-existing notions — if they are going to be meaningful.
Let me show you a simple example of how I encourage students to act like detectives when I’m giving feedback.
One of the tasks my students are currently completing is a simple knowledge-building activity on fossils. They are reading an article and answering a few multiple choice questions. My goal with the task is to deliver information and gather some evidence about student mastery of those basic concepts.
And of course, there are students who are getting questions wrong on the task. If I were grading their papers, I would mark those answers wrong and move on.
But my goal was to “make students act like detectives,” so instead, here’s the feedback I’ve been leaving when students get questions wrong:
Easy, right?
Instead of marking things right or wrong, I highlight three questions, tell my students that one of those questions is wrong, and ask them to go back and see if they can figure out which question is incorrect on their own.
And it’s working. Notice that Emily — the student in this assignment — went back and looked carefully over all three questions and has replied. She’s not totally sure which of her questions is wrong, but THINKS it might be #4.
For what it is worth, she was correct — but even if she wasn’t, she’s done additional thinking about her answers and THAT is what “meaningful and effective feedback” is all about. It’s not about giving a score and moving on. It’s about getting kids to wrestle with their thinking and to look back again at their own performances.
Here’s another Dylan Wiliam quote that I love:
That’s also an easy concept to get my mind wrapped around.
My goal in giving “meaningful and effective feedback” to my students isn’t to just point out what they have done well and where they are struggling. Instead, it is to encourage them to stretch their original thinking in some way, shape or form.
So what does “encouraging students to stretch their original thinking” look like in action?
Here’s an example: Another task my students are working on right now is watching a video on fossils and then generating a wonder question detailing something that they are still thinking about after watching the video.
Look at how I’ve given feedback on Jess’s wonder question:
Knowing that Jess was interested in the connections between mummification and fossilization, I pointed her to a video about cryogenics — the practice of freezing the body of a person who has died in hopes of someday bringing them back to life — and asked her whether or not that’s an example of fossilization in action.
The goal wasn’t just to rate the quality of her original wonder question. The goal was to stretch her thinking in a new direction.
And it worked.
Here was her reply:
Neat, right?
My feedback forced her to go deeper into her studies than she would have otherwise gone.
THAT’s why feedback is always better than grades.
Had I scored Emily or Jess on their responses in a traditional way, they would have looked at my grade and moved on to the next task. But because I provided feedback designed to make both students “act like detectives,” they continued to learn even after the task was over.
Now lemme give you two tips about how you can provide this kind of feedback to students efficiently:
Use the Comment Bank Feature in Google Classroom: If you are already assigning work to students in Google Classroom, make sure that you take advantage of their “comment bank” feature — which allows teachers to create a series of comments before reviewing assignments and then to add those comments to student work quickly and easily.
That’s a HUGE win for meaningful feedback because it means that you can write a thoughtful comment ONCE and add it to student assignments again and again without having to retype it. Given that we tend to see the same kinds of mistakes — and to offer the same kind of feedback — over and over again, this is a huge time-saver.
I did that in the “Emily” example that you see above. She wasn’t the only student to miss questions on the multiple choice portion of the work that I currently have assigned — so LOTS of students saw my “One of these questions is wrong, Kiddo” message.
Want to learn more about how to use the Comment Bank in Google Classroom?
Then check out this post from the Radical Archives.
Find a Few High Interest Videos to Share in Advance: One of the easiest ways to get kids to think beyond the basics right now is to point them to high-interest videos related to the concepts that you are teaching.
Here’s why: Kids sitting at home binging a ton of video content ANYWAY. So if you point them to a high-interest video and ask them a related question, you are more likely to encourage kids to go further than if you just leave text based comments.
That’s what I did in the “Jess” example above.
I had the cryonics video opened in a tab already because I figured that I could connect it to wonder questions that kids had about fossilization, so when I found Jess wondering about mummification, it was easy to grab the link to the video and share it with her.
I also had this video about a museum that was preserving a blue marlin at the ready and used it time and again as feedback for students. It was short and interesting — so I figured kids would watch it. And it was easy for me to encourage additional thinking by saying, “Now check this out. If we are preserving animals like this in museums, will there be any need for fossils in the future?”
That one question — prompted by that one video (which took me five minutes to find) — will stretch the thinking of lots of my kids.
That’s a win, y’all. And it’s WAY better than a grade.
Does any of this make sense? More importantly, can you see the value in rethinking the way that we give feedback to students right now?
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