K. Barry | Secondary | English and French
A question I have been trying to answer lately is “How can I make feedback more work for the students than it is for the teacher?" This comes from Dylan Wiliam’s “Embedded Formative Assessment” where he describes this as “the first fundamental principle of effective classroom feedback”. I’ve already adapted Wiliam’s idea of handing back tests with the marks but not telling students which answers are right or wrong. He describes this in a Maths context, but I have found it works really well in MFL. A lot of the class tests I give in French are based on aspects like verb conjugation, adjectival agreement and simple vocabulary acquisition. The answers are right or wrong, and importantly where they’re wrong is usually because students have either neglected to apply a straightforward rule, or forgotten the exceptions to that rule. This year I’ve been trying out short, twenty-item tests which I give back with only the mark as a fraction out of twenty (very French). The students then “correct” the test themselves in class. This is a win-win in that it is slightly less work for the teacher, but a lot more work for the students as they have to check all their answers and consider both if and how they are right or wrong. This “if and how” principle follows another of Wiliam’s principles: the primary purpose of feedback is to cause learners to think.
What about more extended answers, though? I am thinking particularly about the kind of answers students write in English at senior cycle. There is still a place for simple right vs wrong tests at this level but spellings of key terms and learning off of quotations are only a small part of what we want to assess and promote. When faced with a large bundle of fifth year exam scripts I returned to the “more work for who?” question and came up with an approach that draws on Doug Lemov’s principle of ratio. Lemov applies the idea of ratio to regular classwork, arguing that the key to successful practice is lots of participation by all students so they are the ones doing the hard work of thinking and learning. The principle of ratio can be extended, I believe, to the area of feedback on students’ written work. I’m also influenced here by Dylan Wiliam’s idea of “Four Quarters Marking”, which admits there is a place for close marking of student work, but that this does not need to exceed roughly 25% of what is produced, with self, peer and whole-class feedback making up the other three quarters.
The ratio here is almost 4:1, although I have put the “WCF handout” section in green as it is work for me to write as well as work for them to review and decide which parts are most relevant to them.
The process looks like this:
1. Students sat their November assessment. The Paper II section consisted of two compulsory essay questions, one on “Hamlet” and one of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
2. I corrected these and awarded marks according to the Leaving Cert English PCLM marking scheme. As I was going through them, I had a Word document open where I recorded comments relating to recurring issues. These included issues around tone (liberal use of contractions and the second person leading to an inappropriately informal tone), claims made without supporting evidence, floating/inaccurate quotations, incoherent sequencing of points, and focusing too much on the start of the play, or on one poem, and then running out of time. There weren’t too many factual misconceptions and I either corrected these directly, making a note for future reference.
3. I tidied up these comments into a bullet-point list and handed this out to the class when giving back their test, taking a few minutes to read through it and answer questions. One change I will make in the future is to number this list, which will be handy for step 4.
4. Homework was to read back through their exam, decide which elements of the handout were most relevant to their answers and redo one of the essays in the light of this feedback. I left the choice of which question up to the students. Most of them opted for the “Hamlet” question. An interesting question for another time might be to ask them what made them choose that option.
5. In class, before handing up their new version, they had five minutes to write a reflection on how their new version was better than the first version.
6. By now I’m happy that what I am looking at is the best version of what they can produce at the moment. I read through them and again award PCLM marks, but this is a bit of a non-event as they all know they’ll come up from what they got in the exam and they can also now see really clearly the difference between writing an essay at home and the writing the same essay in exam conditions. I also annotate the essays and give two to three bullet points of feedback at the end. If I were a purist, I’d leave out the marks and just do the annotations and the comments.
Ideally, the seventh step is that this is a formative exercise that the students refer to the next time they are doing a Paper II essay. We will see. Another possible further step is me doing one of the questions myself and going through it with them as a model answer. (Another is using some or all of their work as a peer exemplar. I’m a big believer in peer exemplars as models but in this case, I don’t want to use a student’s answer in a summative exam as a model. Also, at this early stage of the course no-one’s entire re-worked essay was at a standard I’d use a model and, although I do often use single paragraphs as models, the focus in this case was on the overall structure and tone). I feel we need to move on now though and will save the model answer for a future test, and perhaps a future blog post.