Feedback is something that you can see every day when you walk into my site classroom. When giving feedback, we have a purpose in mind. This means we are able to give specific feedback that students can use right away. What I privilege when providing feedback for students is building off of where students are right now. In order to provide feedback for any misconceptions, we need to use the student work that has been done and build off of their thinking. This allows us to provide specific feedback that will help each individual student. Dylan Wiliam states that the teachers need to know each student “to understand what feedback the student needs right now”, in order to give effective feedback in a meaningful way (Wiliam, 2016, 14).

Something else from the reading that I have seen in my site classroom is building students’ capacity for self assessment (Wiliam, 2016, 13). I believe this is an important piece of giving feedback and making it accessible for students. In my site classroom, we often do Rally Coaches. A learning goal for students during these activities is to learn how to give feedback. Students were identifying any mathematical errors and providing feedback to their Rally Partner. In this specific activity, we are building students’ capacity for peer-assessment. The goal for this learning is that they are able to take their assessing abilities and use it on their own work. I believe this is a great activity to meet students where they are and build their capacity for peer- and self-assessment. 

Grading is a way to provide evaluative feedback, but feedback is so much more than just a letter or number grade. Feedback allows us to reduce misconceptions between current understanding and the desired results, but a simple grade may not meet this goal. Although grading is a piece of feedback, we need more in order to provide effective, descriptive feedback. Making feedback into detective work is one way to make sure that feedback is more descriptive than a single grade. When teachers provide feedback as detective work, they encourage students to look at their original work in a new lens using the feedback they were given (Wiliam, 2016, 12-13). This feedback gives us a deeper understanding into each individual student than we would get with a simple grade.

Reference

Wiliam, D. (2016). The secret of effective feedback. Educational Leadership, 73(7), 10-15.