Feedback vs. Grading

What am I privileging when providing feedback?

When giving feedback, I am always focused on helping students improve. While they have been conditioned since the beginning of their schooling career to care deeply about their grades, I make a concerted effort NOT to bring grades into the conversation when giving feedback. Instead, I focus on what specific thing they could do better in order to improve. For example, what is one move they could include in their writing to make it more clear? What is one key vocabulary word that needs to be integrated to their writing to show what they know?

Dylan William, in his journal article, Feedback: Part of a System, said it well, "Perhaps most surprising, a number of studies, notably those by Butler (1987, 1988), showed that feedback in the form of scores and grades could actually reduce student learning" (2012, p. 31).

I try to make it a point to increase student learning in my feedback. I think the best way to do that is to provide actionable, timely, clear, and reasonable feedback to students.

How does it connect to the content I'm teaching?

Because I am interested in guiding students to becoming better writers, my feedback demonstrates that writing is iterative. It has to be done in phases, with many edits and revisions. It's messy and there is no right or wrong answer. This intrinsically moves away from the black-and-white system of grading.