Last week, I wrote pretty extensively about what giving meaningful and engaging feedback on student work could look like.
That’s an important conversation for any time in education — but extra important in the middle of a pandemic when schools and districts are changing grading policies to pass/fail or ditching grades completely in an attempt to ensure equity for kids who have different (and often exceptionally chaotic) home lives right now.
A colleague read that post and reached out with an interesting question.
“I like your example about asking kids to find their own incorrect answers, Bill,” she wrote. “But what about kids that get 100s on everything? How do you give them meaningful and engaging feedback?”
So let me share an example with you.
My students are currently watching an Edpuzzle video on Geologic Time. In addition to answering five fact-based multiple choice questions, I ask the students to answer one open-ended question: List three important facts in the video and then rank order them from “Most Important” to “Least Important.”
Aashie — one of my superstars — got a 100 on the task. All of her multiple choice questions were correct — and here was her response to the open-ended question:
Given that Aashie has answered the question correctly, I could have given her a 100 and moved on. That’s probably the most efficient thing to do, anyway.
But if I gave her a 100 and moved on, the learning would have ended for Aashie, right? You know that. She would have seen a 100 in the gradebook and moved on to the next task without ever thinking about geologic time again.
That’s bad practice, y’all. Just because Aashie made a 100 on this assignment doesn’t mean that she doesn’t deserve to have her thinking challenged, too. The goal of a teacher should be to stretch the thinking of EVERY kid in their classrooms — including those who seem to “get it” already.
So here’s the feedback that I gave to Aashie:
Do you see what I’m doing here?
What Aashie noticed in her initial work was that humans didn’t appear very early in the history of geologic time. That surprised her. She thought humans had been around for a lot longer than they really had been.
But her answer doesn’t include any specifics. She uses terms like “in the first time period” or “in the middle.”
To stretch her thinking, I want her to gather those specifics — something that I probably won’t ask my struggling learners to do, but something that is the perfect “challenge task” for a kid like Aashie.
So I ask her to look at percentages of time covered by each geologic era, including the one that humans are found in. If she struggles to do this work on her own, I will probably point her to this interactive infographic as a scaffold to help her answer my question.
What’s the lesson to learn here?
Grades — whether they are given to struggling students or kids who excel — are an endpoint. Feedback is the beginning of a reflective conversation. Our goal with feedback should be to challenge kids to think more — or to move them towards a new discovery.
That’s not all that hard to do. It just takes a willingness to hold back on marking everything that our students turn in.
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